We prove several results concerning the existence of surfaces of section for the geodesic flows of closed orientable Riemannian surfaces. The surfaces of section $\Sigma $ that we construct are either Birkhoff sections, which means that they intersect every sufficiently long orbit segment of the geodesic flow, or at least they have some hyperbolic components in $\partial \Sigma $ as limit sets of the orbits of the geodesic flow that do not return to $\Sigma $. In order to prove these theorems, we provide a study of configurations of simple closed geodesics of closed orientable Riemannian surfaces, which may have independent interest. Our arguments are based on the curve shortening flow.

For $k \geq 2$ , we prove that in a $C^{1}$ -open and $C^{k}$ -dense set of some classes of $C^{k}$ -Anosov flows, all Lyapunov exponents have multiplicity one with respect to appropriate measures. The classes are geodesic flows with equilibrium states of Holder-continuous potentials, volume-preserving flows, and all fiber-bunched Anosov flows with equilibrium states of Holder-continuous potentials.

A Riemannian manifold $M$ has higher hyperbolic rank if every geodesic has a perpendicular Jacobi field making sectional curvature $-1$ with the geodesic. If, in addition, the sectional curvatures of $M$ lie in the interval $[-1,-\frac{1}{4}]$ and $M$ is closed, we show that $M$ is a locally symmetric space of rank one. This partially extends work by Constantine using completely different methods. It is also a partial counterpart to Hamenstädt’s hyperbolic rank rigidity result for sectional curvatures $\leq -1$, and complements well-known results on Euclidean and spherical rank rigidity.

We consider the semiclassical Schrödinger equation on a compact negatively curved surface. For any sequence of initial data microlocalized on the unit cotangent bundle, we look at the quantum evolution (below the Ehrenfest time) under small perturbations of the Schrödinger equation, and we prove that, in the semiclassical limit, and for typical perturbations, the solutions become equidistributed on the unit cotangent bundle.