Equidistribution of expanding curves in homogeneous spaces and Diophantine approximation for square matrices

Lei Yang

Published 2013-11-05, updated 2015-11-08Version 4

In this article, we study an analytic curve $\varphi: I=[a,b]\rightarrow \mathrm{M}(n\times n, \mathbb{R})$ in the space of $n$ by $n$ real matrices, and show that if $\varphi$ satisfies certain geometric conditions, then for almost every point on the curve, the Diophantine approximation given by Dirichlet's Theorem is not improvable. To do this, we embed the curve into some homogeneous space $G/\Gamma$, and prove that under the action of some expanding diagonal flow $A= \{a(t): t \in \mathbb{R}\}$, the expanding curves tend to be equidistributed in $G/\Gamma$, as $t \rightarrow +\infty$. This solves a special case of a problem proposed by Nimish Shah in ~\cite{Shah_1}.