Counting and equidistribution of reciprocal geodesics and dihedral groups

Abstract

We study the growth of the number of conjugacy classes of infinite dihedral subgroups of lattices in PSL(2,R), generalizing earlier work of Sarnak and Bourgain-Kontorovich on the growth of the number of reciprocal geodesics on the modular surface. We also prove that reciprocal geodesics are equidistributed in the unit tangent bundle.

16 pages