Logarithm laws for flows on homogeneous spaces

Abstract.

In this paper we generalize and sharpen D. Sullivan’s logarithm law for geodesics by specifying conditions on a sequence of subsets {A _t  | t∈ℕ} of a homogeneous space G/Γ (G a semisimple Lie group, Γ an irreducible lattice) and a sequence of elements f _t of G under which #{t∈ℕ | f _t x∈A _t } is infinite for a.e. x∈G/Γ. The main tool is exponential decay of correlation coefficients of smooth functions on G/Γ. Besides the general (higher rank) version of Sullivan’s result, as a consequence we obtain a new proof of the classical Khinchin-Groshev theorem on simultaneous Diophantine approximation, and settle a conjecture recently made by M. Skriganov.