Poincaré series and linking of Legendrian knots

Abstract

On a negatively curved surface, we show that the Poincare series counting geodesic arcs orthogonal to some pair of closed geodesic curves has a meromorphic continuation to the whole complex plane. When both curves are homologically trivial, we prove that the Poincare series has an explicit rational value at 0 interpreting it in terms of linking number of Legendrian knots. In particular, for any pair of points on the surface, the lengths of all geodesic arcs connecting the two points determine its genus, and, for any pair of homologically trivial closed geodesics, the lengths of all geodesic arcs orthogonal to both geodesics determine the linking number of the two geodesics.