Abstract: In this talk we first discuss the construction of the measure of maximal entropy for the geodesic flow on surfaces without conjugate points via Patterson-Sullivan measures. We then use the geometric properties of this construction to give an exact asymptotic growth rate of closed orbit which is known as Margulis estimates in the case of negative curvature, i.e. we prove that the number of homotopy classes of the closed geodesics of length less than T>0 is of order of exp(hT)/T where h is the topological entropy of the system. This is based on a joint work with Vaughn Climenhaga and Gerhard Knieper.


