Intersecting geodesics on the modular surface

Abstract

We introduce the \textit{modular intersection kernel}, and we use it to study how geodesics intersect on the full modular surface $\mathbb{X}=PSL_2\left(\mathbb{Z}\right) \backslash \mathbb{H}$. Let $C_d$ be the union of closed geodesics with discriminant $d$ and let $\beta\subset \mathbb{X}$ be a compact geodesic segment. As an application of Duke's theorem to the modular intersection kernel, we prove that $ \{\left(p,\theta_p\right)~:~p\in \beta \cap C_d\}$ becomes equidistributed with respect to $\sin \theta ds d\theta$ on $\beta \times [0,\pi]$ with a power saving rate as $d \to +\infty$. Here $\theta_p$ is the angle of intersection between $\beta$ and $C_d$ at $p$. This settles the main conjectures introduced by Rickards \cite{rick}. We prove a similar result for the distribution of angles of intersections between $C_{d_1}$ and $C_{d_2}$ with a power-saving rate in $d_1$ and $d_2$ as $d_1+d_2 \to \infty$. Previous works on the corresponding problem for compact surfaces do not apply to $\mathbb{X}$, because of the singular behavior of the modular intersection kernel near the cusp. We analyze the singular behavior of the modular intersection kernel by approximating it by general (not necessarily spherical) point-pair invariants on $PSL_2\left(\mathbb{Z}\right) \backslash PSL_2\left(\mathbb{R}\right)$ and then by studying their full spectral expansion.