Counting arcs on hyperbolic surfaces

Abstract

We give the asymptotic growth of the number of arcs of bounded length between boundary components on hyperbolic surfaces with boundary. Specifically, if $S$ has genus $g$, $n$ boundary components and $p$ punctures, then the number of orthogeodesic arcs in each pure mapping class group orbit of length at most $L$ is asymptotic to $L^{6g-6+2(n+p)}$ times a constant. We prove an analogous result for arcs between cusps, where we define the length of such an arc to be the length of the sub-arc obtained by removing certain cuspidal regions from the surface.