Bounded and divergent trajectories and expanding curves on homogeneous spaces

Suppose g_t is a 1-parameter \mathrm {Ad}-diagonalizable subgroup of a Lie group G and \Gamma < G is a lattice. We study the dimension of bounded and divergent orbits of g_t emanating from a class of curves lying on leaves of the unstable foliation of g_t on the homogeneous space G/\Gamma . We obtain sharp upper bounds on the Hausdorff dimension of divergent on average orbits and show that the set of bounded orbits is winning in the sense of Schmidt (and, hence, has full dimension). The class of curves we study is roughly characterized by being tangent to copies of \mathrm {SL}(2,\mathbb{R}) inside G, which are not contained in a proper parabolic subgroup of G. We describe applications of our results to problems in Diophantine approximation by number fields and intrinsic Diophantine approximation on spheres. Our methods also yield the following result for lines in the space of square systems of linear forms: suppose \varphi (s) = sY + Z where Y\in \mathrm {GL}(n,\mathbb{R}) and Z\in M_{n,n}(\mathbb{R}). Then, the dimension of the set of points s such that \varphi (s) is singular is at most 1/2 while badly approximable points have Hausdorff dimension equal to 1.