Stable windings on hyperbolic surfaces

Let ℳ be a geometrically finite hyperbolic surface with infinite volume, having at least one cusp. We obtain the limit law under the Patterson-Sullivan measure on T ¹ℳ of the windings of the geodesics of ℳ around the cusps. This limit law is stable with parameter 2δ− 1, where δ is the Hausdorff dimension of the limit set of the subgroup Γ of M?bius isometries associated with ℳ. The normalization is t ^{−1/(2δ−1)}, for geodesics of length t. Our method relies on a precise comparison between geodesics and diffusion paths, for which we need to approach the Patterson-Sullivan measure mentioned above by measures that are regular along the stable leaves. Received: 8 October 1999 / Revised version: 2 June 2000 / Published online: 21 December 2000