Diophantine approximation exponents on homogeneous varieties

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Recent years have seen very important developments at the interface of Diophantine approximation and homogeneous dynamics. In the first part of the paper we give a brief exposition of a dictionary developed by Dani and Kleinbock-Margulis which relates Diophantine properties of vectors to distribution of orbits of flows on the space of unimodular lattices. In the second part of the paper we briefly describe an extension of this dictionary recently developed by the authors, which establishes an analogous dynamical correspondence for general lattice orbits on homogeneous spaces. We concentrate specifically on the problem of estimating exponents of Diophantine approximation by arithmetic lattices acting on algebraic varieties. In the third part of the paper, we exemplify our results by establishing explicit bounds for the Diophantine exponent of dense lattice orbits in a number of basic cases. These include the linear and affine actions on affine spaces, and the action on the variety of matrices of fixed determinant. In some cases, these exponents are shown to be best possible.