Chaos in large genus surfaces

Abstract

Geodesic flows on closed hyperbolic surfaces are a quintessential example of chaotic dynamics, i.e., systems whose long term behavior is very sensitive to initial conditions. The speed of such chaos is controlled by the spectral gap of the Laplace-Beltrami operator of the underlying hyperbolic surface. In this paper we give an overview of recent breakthroughs of Anantharaman and Monk showing that large genus closed hyperbolic surfaces have optimal spectral gap in a probabilistic sense. On the way we introduce and discuss the foundational works of many authors, from Selberg to Mirzakhani, that play a crucial role in the tour de force proof of Anantharaman and Monk.