Pair correlation and equidistribution on manifolds

Abstract

This study is motivated by a series of recent papers that show that, if a given deterministic sequence in the unit interval has a Poisson pair correlation function, then the sequence is uniformly distributed. Analogous results have been proved for point sequences on higher-dimensional tori. The purpose of this paper is to describe a simple statistical argument that explains this observation and furthermore permits a generalisation to bounded Euclidean domains as well as compact Riemannian manifolds.