On the equidistribution of totally geodesic submanifolds in compact locally symmetric spaces and application to boundedness results for negative curves and exceptional divisors

Abstract: We prove an equidistribution result for totally geodesic submanifolds in a compact locally symmetric space. In the case of Hermitian locally symmetric spaces, this gives a convergence theorem for currents of integration along totally geodesic subvarieties. As a corollary, we obtain that on a complex surface which is a compact quotient of the bidisc or of the 2-ball, there is at most a finite number of totally geodesic curves with negative self intersection. More generally, we prove that there are only finitely many exceptional totally geodesic divisors in a compact Hermitian locally symmetric space of the noncompact type of dimension at least 2.