Residual equidistribution of modular symbols and cohomology classes for quotients of hyperbolic $n$-space

Abstract

We provide a new and simple automorphic method using Eisenstein series to study the equidistribution of modular symbols modulo primes, which we apply to prove an average version of a conjecture of Mazur and Rubin. More precisely, we prove that modular symbols corresponding to a Hecke basis of weight 2 cusp forms are asymptotically jointly equidistributed mod $p$ while we allow restrictions on the location of the cusps. As an application, we obtain a residual equidistribution result for Dedekind sums. Furthermore, we calculate the variance of the distribution and show a surprising bias with connections to perturbation theory. Additionally, we prove the full conjecture in some particular cases using a connection to Eisenstein congruences. Finally, our methods generalise to equidistribution results for cohomology classes of finite volume quotients of $n$-dimensional hyperbolic space.

arXiv comment23 pages+ 7 page appendix. Updated version with additions including: applications to equidistribution of Dedekind sums and a computation of the variance. Furthermore, a small mistake in Theorem 1.5 has been fixed