Moments of the boundary hitting function for the geodesic flow on a hyperbolic manifold

Abstract

In this paper we consider finite volume hyperbolic manifolds X with non-empty totally geodesic boundary. We consider the distribution of the times for the geodesic flow to hit the boundary and derive a formula for the moments of the associated random variable in terms of the orthospectrum. We show that the the first two moments correspond to two cases of known identities for the orthospectrum. We further obtain an explicit formula in terms of the trilogarithm functions for the average time for the geodesic flow to hit the boundary in the surface case, using the third moment.