Counting geodesics on expander surfaces

Abstract

We study properties of typical closed geodesics on expander surfaces of high genus, i.e. closed hyperbolic surfaces with a uniform spectral gap of the Laplacian. Under an additional systole lower bound assumption, we show almost every geodesic of length much greater than $\sqrt{g}\log g$ is non-simple. And we prove almost every closed geodesic of length much greater than $g (\log g)^2$ is filling, i.e. each component of the complement of the geodesic is a topological disc. Our results apply to Weil-Petersson random surfaces, random covers of a fixed surface, and Brooks-Makover random surfaces, since these models are known to have uniform spectral gap asymptotically almost surely. Our proof technique involves adapting Margulis' counting strategy to work at low length scales.