Effective equidistribution of shears and applications (Q681629)

A shear is a unipotent translate of a cuspidal geodesic ray in a quotient \(\Gamma\backslash {\mathbb H}\) of the hyperbolic plae \(\mathbb H\). A shear is no longer a geodesic, but a ``tilted'' geodesic ray. The group \(\Gamma\) here is a geometrically finite discrete subgroup of \(\mathrm{PSL}_1({\mathbb R})\), possibly of infinite volume. The main theorem of the paper is an equidistribution result of shears under large translates with effective rates. Applications to weighted second moments of \(\mathrm{GL}_2\) automorphic L-functions and to counting of lattice points are given. Here weighted moment means an integral of \(|L(f,s)|^2\) along the critical axis against an explicit weight factor \(|w(s,T)|^2\) which depends on the translate \(T>0\) and the distribution as \(T\to\infty\) is computed.