Typical geodesics on flat surfaces

Abstract

We investigate typical behavior of geodesics on a closed flat surface S of genus g ≥ 2. We compare the length quotient of long arcs in the same homotopy class with fixed endpoints for the flat and the hyperbolic metric in the same conformal class. This quotient is asymptotically constant F a.e. We show that F is bounded from below by the inverse of the volume entropy e(S). Moreover, we construct a geodesic flow together with a measure on S which is induced by the Hausdorff measure of the Gromov boundary of the universal cover. Denote by e(S) the volume entropy of S and let c be a compact geodesic arc which connects singularities. We show that a typical geodesic passes through c with frequency that is comparable to exp(−e(S)ƪ(c)). Thus a typical bi-infinite geodesic contains infinitely many singularities, and each geodesic between singularities c appears infinitely often with a frequency proportional to exp(−e(S)ƪ(c)). © 2011 American Mathematical Society.