Exponents for the Equidistribution of Shears and Applications

In previous work, the authors introduced "soft" methods to prove the effective (i.e. with power savings error) equidistribution of "shears" in cusped hyperbolic surfaces. In this paper, we study the same problem but now allow full use of the spectral theory of automorphic forms to produce explicit exponents, and uniformity in parameters. We give applications to counting square values of quadratic forms.