English

Prime geodesic theorem and closed geodesics for large genus

Geometric Topology 2025-06-06 v3 Differential Geometry Number Theory Spectral Theory

Abstract

Let Mg\mathcal{M}_g be the moduli space of hyperbolic surfaces of genus gg endowed with the Weil-Petersson metric. In this paper, we show that for any ϵ>0\epsilon>0, as gg\to \infty, for a generic surface in Mg\mathcal{M}_g, the error term in the Prime Geodesic Theorem is bounded from above by gt34+ϵg\cdot t^{\frac{3}{4}+\epsilon}, up to a uniform constant multiplication. The expected value of the error term in the Prime Geodesic Theorem over Mg\mathcal{M}_g is also studied. As an application, we show that as gg\to \infty, on a generic hyperbolic surface in Mg\mathcal{M}_g most closed geodesics of length significantly less than g\sqrt{g} are simple and non-separating, and most closed geodesics of length significantly greater than g\sqrt{g} are not simple, which confirms a conjecture of Lipnowski-Wright. A novel effective upper bound for intersection numbers on Mg,n\mathcal{M}_{g,n} is also established, when certain indices are large compared to g+n\sqrt{g+n}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2209.10415,
  title  = {Prime geodesic theorem and closed geodesics for large genus},
  author = {Yunhui Wu and Yuhao Xue},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.10415},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Journal of the European Mathematical Society, to appear. 63 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-28T01:49:34.549Z