Horospherical flow of frames on three-dimensional hyperbolic manifolds and the spectrum of Kleinian groups (Q1865821)

This paper analyzes the behavior of the horospherical flow in the oriented orthonormal frame bundle of a three-dimensional hyperbolic manifold. This flow has a complex parameter (hence two real parameters). It generalizes results of Dal'Bo and Starkov for the horocycle flow. The horospherical flow in hyperbolic three space is defined as follows. Given a point \(x\) in hyperbolic space, an oriented frame on \(x\) consists of a positively oriented orthonormal basis \(\{u_0,u_1,u_2\}\). Let \(H\) be the unique horosphere containing \(x\), tangent to \(u_1\) and \(u_2\) and such that \(u_0\) points to its convex side. The horosphere is isometric to Euclidean plane, the flow acts on \(H\) by the natural action of \(\mathbb R^2\cong \mathbb C\) by translations, and maps \(u_i\) by using parallel transport along the horosphere. The orientation and the Euclidean metric are used in the identification \(\mathbb R^2\cong \mathbb C\). This construction can also be described using an identification of the orthonormal frame bundle with \(\text{PSL}(2,\mathbb C)\). This flow naturally projects to hyperbolic manifolds, and the author discusses the topology of its orbits, whether they are compact, diverge or dense. For instance, he proves that a manifold is compact if and only if all orbits of the horospherical flow are dense, or has finite volume if and only if all orbits are either dense or compact. These results are the consequence of theorems that describe the orbit in terms of a lift in hyperbolic space of the frame: one looks at the end-point of the geodesic tangent to the first vector of this lifted frame, and the behavior of this point as limit point of the Kleinian group is related to the topology of the orbit. Using the identification of the isometry group and the frame bundle with \(\text{PSL}(2,\mathbb C)\), the orbit space of the horospherical flow is naturally identified to \({\mathbb C^2}-\{0\}/\pm \text{Id}\). Thus the main results of the paper are restated and proved in terms of the linear action of the Kleinian group on \({\mathbb C^2}-\{0\}/\pm \text{Id}\). A key tool in the proof is the analysis of the set of complex lengths of hyperbolic elements of the Kleinian group: if the group is not Fuchsian, then the multiplicative group generated by the exponential of these numbers is dense in \(\mathbb C^*\).