This version (217 pages, 13 figures) has many minor corrections, but no new material. The book will appear in the Chicago Lectures in Mathematics Series of the University of Chicago Press
Unipotent flows are well-behaved dynamical systems. In particular, Marina Ratner has shown that the closure of every orbit for such a flow is of a nice algebraic (or geometric) form. After presenting some consequences of this important theorem, these lectures explain the main ideas of the proof. Some algebraic technicalities will be pushed to the background.
Chapter 1 is the main part of the book. It is intended for a fairly general audience, and provides an elementary introduction to the subject, by presenting examples that illustrate the theorem, some of its applications, and the main ideas involved in the proof. It should be largely accessible to second-year graduate students.
Chapter 2 gives an elementary introduction to the theory of entropy. Chapter 3 presents some basic facts of ergodic theory, and Chapter 4 lists some facts about algebraic groups.
Chapter 5 presents a fairly complete (but not entirely rigorous) proof of the measure-theoretic version of Ratner's Theorem. (We follow the approach of G.A.Margulis and G.Tomanov.) Unlike the other chapters, it is rather technical.
We study Kakutani equivalence in the class of unipotent flows acting on finite volume quotients of semisimple Lie groups. For every such flow we compute the Kakutani invariant of M. Ratner, the value of which being explicitly given by the Jordan block structure of the unipotent element generating the flow. This in particular answers a question of M. Ratner. Moreover it follows that the only standard unipotent flows are given by $\begin{pmatrix} 1 & t \\ 0 & 1 \end{pmatrix} \times \operatorname{id}$ acting on $(SL(2,\mathbb{R}) \times G')/Γ'$, where $Γ'$ is an irreducible lattice in $SL(2,\math…
Let G=ASL(2,R) be the affine special linear group of the plane, and set Gamma=ASL(2,Z). Building on recent work of Strömbergsson we prove a rate of equidistribution for the orbits of a certain 1-dimensional unipotent flow of Gamma\G, which projects to a closed horocycle in the unit tangent bundle to the modular surface. We use this to answer a question of Elkies and McMullen by making effective the convergence of the gap distribution of \sqrt{n} modulo 1.
We study the cocompact lattices $Γ\subset SO(n,1)$ so that the Laplace-Beltrami operator $Δ$ on $SO(n)\backslash SO(n,1)/Γ$ has eigenvalues in $(0,1/4)$, and then show that there exist time-changes of unipotent flows on $SO(n,1)/Γ$ that are not measurably conjugate to the unperturbed ones. A main ingredient of the proof is a stronger version of the branching of the complementary series. Combining it with a refinement of the works of Ratner and Flaminio-Forni is adequate for our purpose.
Let $u_{X}^{t}$ be a unipotent flow on $X=SO(n,1)/Γ$, $u_{Y}^{t}$ be a unipotent flow on $Y=G/Γ^{\prime}$. Let $\tilde{u}_{X}^{t}$, $\tilde{u}_{Y}^{t}$ be time-changes of $u_{X}^{t}$, $u_{Y}^{t}$ respectively. We show the disjointness (in the sense of Furstenberg) between $u_{X}^{t}$ and $\tilde{u}_{Y}^{t}$ (or $\tilde{u}_{X}^{t}$ and $u_{Y}^{t}$) in certain situations. Our method refines the works of Ratner and extends a recent work of Dong, Kanigowski and Wei.
We apply a method inspired by Ratner's work on quantitative mixing for the geodesic flow (Ergod. Theory Dyn. Syst., 1987) and developed by Burger (Duke Math. J., 1990) to study ergodic integrals for horocycle flows. We derive an explicit asymptotic expansion for horocycle averages, recovering a celebrated result by Flaminio and Forni (Duke Math. J., 2003), and we show that the coefficients in the asymptotic expansion are Hölder continuous with respect to the base point. Furthermore, we provide short and streamlined proofs of the spatial limit theorems of Bufetov and Forni (Ann. Sci. Éc. Norm. …
Measure rigidity is a branch of ergodic theory that has recently contributed to the solution of some fundamental problems in number theory and mathematical physics. Examples are proofs of quantitative versions of the Oppenheim conjecture, related questions on the spacings between the values of quadratic forms, a proof of quantum unique ergodicity for certain classes of hyperbolic surfaces, and an approach to the Littlewood conjecture on the nonexistence of multiplicatively badly approximable numbers. In these lectures we discuss a few simple applications of one of the central results in measur…
There is a natural action of SL(2,R) on the moduli space of translation surfaces, and this yields an action of the unipotent subgroup $U = {\begin{pmatrix} 1 & * 0 & 1 \end{pmatrix}}$. We classify the U-invariant ergodic measures on certain special submanifolds of the moduli space. (Each submanifold is the SL(2,R)-orbit of the set of branched covers of a fixed Veech surface.) For the U-action on these submanifolds, this is an analogue of Ratner's Theorem on unipotent flows. The result yields an asymptotic estimate of the number of periodic trajectories for billiards in a certain family of non-…
We provide a self-contained, accessible introduction to Ratner's Equidistribution Theorem in the special case of horocyclic flow on a complete hyperbolic surface of finite area. This equidistribution result was first obtained in the early 1980s by Dani and Smillie and later reappeared as an illustrative special case of Ratner's work on the equidistribution of unipotent flows in homogeneous spaces. We also prove an interesting probabilistic result due to Breuillard: on the modular surface an arbitrary uncentered random walk on the horocycle through almost any point will fail to equidistribute, …
We provide a new proof that the horocycle flow preserving the Margulis measure on a variable negative curvature surface is standard. This was first proved by Ratner. The main purpose of this note is to provide a simplified case of the arguments for Kakutani equivalence of unipotent flows on homogeneous spaces, which have similar but more complicated structures, as well as illustrate the versatility of the method by applying it to a non-homogeneous flow.
We study the general problem of equidistribution of expanding translates of an analytic curve by an algebraic diagonal flow on the homogeneous space $G/Γ$ of a semisimple algebraic group $G$. We define two families of algebraic subvarieties of the associated partial flag variety $G/P$, which give the obstructions to non-divergence and equidistribution. We apply this to prove that for Lebesgue almost every point on an analytic curve in the space of $m\times n$ real matrices whose image is not contained in any subvariety coming from these two families, the Dirichlet's theorem on simultaneous Dio…
A celebrated result of Ratner from the eighties says that two horocycle flows on hyperbolic surfaces of finite area are either the same up to algebraic change of coordinates, or they have no non-trivial joinings. Recently, Mohammadi and Oh extended Ratner's theorem to horocycle flows on hyperbolic surfaces of infinite area but finite genus. In this paper, we present the first joining classification result of a horocycle flow on a hyperbolic surface of infinite genus: a $\mathbb{Z}$ or $\mathbb{Z}^2$-cover of a general compact hyperbolic surface. We also discuss several applications.
We will prove an S-arithmetic version of a theorem of Dani-Margulis on the convergence of ergodic averages of a given bounded continuous function, when the initial point is outside certain compact subsets of the singular set associated to the unipotent flow.
We prove analogues of the logarithm laws of Sullivan and Kleinbock-Margulis in the context of unipotent flows. In particular, we obtain results for one-parameter actions on the space of lattices $SL(n, \R)/SL(n, \Z)$. The key lemma for our results says the measure of the set of unimodular lattices in $\R^n$ that does not intersect a `large' volume subset of $\R^n$ is `small'. This can be considered as a `random' analogue of the classical Minkowski theorem in the geometry of numbers.
We study the dynamics of unipotent flows on frame bundles of hyperbolic manifolds of infinite volume. We prove that they are topologi-cally transitive, and that the natural invariant measure, the so-called " Burger-Roblin measure ", is ergodic, as soon as the geodesic flow admits a finite measure of maximal entropy, and this entropy is strictly greater than the codi-mension of the unipotent flow inside the maximal unipotent flow. The latter result generalises a Theorem of Mohammadi and Oh.
We use Ratner's theorem to compute the asymptotics of the number of (cylinders of) periodic trajectories in a rectangle with a barrier, assuming that the location p/q of the barrier is rational. We also show that as q tends to infinity, the constant in the asymptotic formula tends to the constant for the generic genus 2 flat surface.
We use the theory of unipotent flows to prove, in a general setting, the equidistribution of Hecke points. We follow the approach of Burger-Sarnak, and use a theorem of Mozes-Shah.
Let $G$ be a semisimple Lie group of rank $1$ and $Γ$ be a torsion free discrete subgroup of $G$. We show that in $G/Γ$, given $ε>0$, any trajectory of a unipotent flow remains in the set of points with injectivity radius larger than $ δ$ for $1-ε$ proportion of the time for some $δ>0$. The result also holds for any finitely generated discrete subgroup $Γ$ and this generalizes Dani's quantitative nondivergence theorem \cite{D} for lattices of rank one semisimple groups. Furthermore, for a fixed $ε>0$ there exists an injectivity radius $δ$ such that for any unipotent trajectory $\{u_tx\}_{t\in …
We present a new proof of the following theorem of Benoist-Quint: Let $G:=SO^\circ(d,1)$, $d\ge 2$ and $Δ<G$ a cocompact lattice. Any orbit of a Zariski dense subgroup $Γ$ of $G$ is either finite or dense in $Δ\backslash G$. While Benoist and Quint's proof is based on the classification of stationary measures, our proof is topological, using ideas from the study of dynamics of unipotent flows on the infinite volume homogeneous space $Γ\backslash G$.
We present a new approach to metric Diophantine approximation on manifolds based on the correspondence between approximation properties of numbers and orbit properties of certain flows on homogeneous spaces. This approach yields a new proof of a conjecture of Mahler, originally settled by V. Sprindzhuk in 1964. We also prove several related hypotheses of A. Baker and V. Sprindzhuk formulated in 1970s. The core of the proof is a theorem which generalizes and sharpens earlier results on non-divergence of unipotent flows on the space of lattices.
The Teichmuller unipotent flow can be defined concretely on certain moduli spaces of singular flat surfaces by shearing polygonal presentations of the surfaces. Thurston's earthquake flow on moduli spaces of hyperbolic surfaces is more mysterious. Both flows have deep and important connections to other areas of mathematics. In this expository survey we give a geometric account of the main ideas behind Mirzakhani's theorem relating these two flows. Our presentation avoids some technical prerequisites that featured in the original more analytic presentation.
