Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 May 2012
On the unit tangent bundle of a hyperbolic surface, we study the density of positive orbits $(h^s v)_{s\ge 0}$ under the horocyclic flow. More precisely, given a full orbit $(h^sv)_{s\in {\mathbb R}}$, we prove that under a weak assumption on the vector $v$, both half-orbits $(h^sv)_{s\ge 0}$ and $(h^s v)_{s\le 0}$ are simultaneously dense or not in the non-wandering set $\mathcal {E}$of the horocyclic flow. We give also a counterexample to this result when this assumption is not satisfied.