Ergodicity and intersections of nodal sets and geodesics on real analytic surfaces (Q2447218)

This paper is part of a program of which the ultimate objective is to establish that the nodal sets of the eigenfunctions \(\varphi_j\) of the Laplacian on a real-analytic Riemannian surface, with ergodic geodesic flow on the tangent bundle, become equidistributed, in an appropriate sense, as \(j\) tends to infinity. In this paper, the main result is that ``in the complex domain, as the eigenvalue goes to \(\infty\), the intersections of nodal sets with generic periodic and non-periodic geodesics condense along the underlying real geodesic and become uniformly distributed with respect to its arclength,'' along a subsequence \((\lambda_{j_k})\) of eigenvalues of density one. The results involve an asymmetry condition spelled out in an appendix, in which material from \textit{J. A. Toth} and \textit{S. Zelditch} [Geom. Funct. Anal. 23, No. 2, 715--775 (2013; Zbl 1277.53088)] is recalled. The second result ``is somewhat weaker due to the non-compactness of non-periodic geodesics.'' The proofs rely on the calculus of Toeplitz operators developed by Boutet de Monvel and Guillemin.