Slope Gap Distributions of Veech Surfaces

Abstract

The slope gap distribution of a translation surface is a measure of how random the directions of the saddle connections on the surface are. It is known that Veech surfaces, a highly symmetric type of translation surface, have gap distributions that are piecewise real analytic. Beyond that, however, very little is currently known about the general behavior of the slope gap distribution, including the number of points of non-analyticity or the tail. We show that the limiting gap distribution of slopes of saddle connections on a Veech translation surface is always piecewise real-analytic with \emph{finitely} many points of non-analyticity. We do so by taking an explicit parameterization of a Poincar\'{e} section to the horocycle flow on $\text{SL}(2,\mathbb{R})/\text{SL}(X,\omega)$ associated to an arbitrary Veech surface $\text{SL}(X,\omega)$ and establishing a key finiteness result for the first return map under this flow. We use the finiteness result to show that the tail of the slope gap distribution of Veech surfaces always has quadratic decay.