Sectorial Equidistribution of the Roots of x2 + 1 Modulo Primes

Abstract

The equation $x^2 + 1 = 0\mod p$ has solutions whenever p = 2 or $4n + 1$. A famous theorem of Fermat says that these primes are exactly the ones that can be described as a sum of two squares. The roots of the former equation are equidistributed is a beautiful theorem of Duke, Friedlander and Iwaniec. The angles associated to the representation of such prime as a sum of squares are equidistributed is a famous theorem of Hecke. We give a natural way to associate between roots and angles and prove that the joint equidistribution of the sequence of pairs of roots and angles is equidistributed as well. Our approach involves an automorphic interpretation, which reduces the problem to the study of certain Poincare series on an arithmetic quotient of $SL_2(\mathbb{R})$. Since our Poincare series have a nontrivial dependence on their Iwasawa θ-coordinate, they do not factor into functions on the upper half plane, as in the case studied by Duke et al. Spectral analysis on these higher dimensional varieties involves the nonspherical spectrum, making this paper the first complete study of a nonspherical equidistribution problem, with an arithmetic application. A couple of notable challenges we had to overcome were that of obtaining pointwise bounds for nonspherical Eisenstein series and utilizing a non-spherical analogue of the Selberg inversion formula, which we believe may have further implications beyond this work.