Related papers: Simple loop conjecture for limit groups
We give counterexamples to a version of the simple loop conjecture in which the target group is PSL(2,C). These examples answer a question of Minsky in the negative.
In this note, we give an explicit counterexample to the simple loop conjecture for representations of surface groups into PSL(2,R). Specifically, we show that for any surface with negative Euler characteristic and genus at least 1, there…
Cooper-Manning and Louder gave examples of maps of surface groups to PSL(2,C) which are not injective, but are incompressible (i.e. no simple loop is in the kernel). We construct more examples with very simple certificates for their…
We give a new proof of rationality of stable commutator length (scl) of certain elements in surface groups: those represented by curves that do not fill the surface. Such elements always admit extremal surfaces for scl. These results also…
The mapping class group of a surface $\S$ acts on the set of closed geodesics on $\S$. This action preserves self-intersection number. In this paper, we count the orbits of curves with at most $K$ self-intersections, for each $K \geq 1$.…
We prove that Anosov representations from a surface group to SL(3,R) are uniquely determined by their boundary maps if and only if they do not factor over a completely reducible representation. Furthermore we discuss representations not…
We show that uniform lattices in some semi-simple groups (notably complex ones) admit Anosov surface subgroups. This result has a quantitative version: we introduce a notion, called $K$-Sullivan maps, which generalizes the notion of…
We provide several families of compact complex curves embedded in smooth complex surfaces such that no neighborhood of the curve can be embedded in an algebraic surface. Different constructions are proposed, by patching neighborhoods of…
We give results on when a finitely generated group has only indiscrete embeddings in SL(2,C), with particular reference to 3-manifold groups. For instance if we glue two copies of the figure 8 knot along its torus boundary then the…
We resume the study initiated in \cite{CL}. For a generic curve $C$ in an ample linear system $\vert \mathcal{L} \vert$ on a toric surface $X$, a vanishing cycle of $C$ is an isotopy class of simple closed curve that can be contracted to a…
We study mapping class group orbits of homotopy and isotopy classes of curves with self-intersections. We exhibit the asymptotics of the number of such orbits of curves with a bounded number of self-intersections, as the complexity of the…
The fundamental group of every surface that is not the projective plane or Klein bottle has a representation to a torsion-free group of upper-triangular matrices in SL(2,R) with no simple loop (i.e. a nontrivial element representing a…
We give bounds on the number of non-simple closed curves on a negatively curved surface, given upper bounds on both length and self-intersection number. In particular, it was previously known that the number of all closed curves of length…
We produce a sequence of finite dimensional representations of the fundamental group $\pi_1(S)$ of a closed surface where all simple closed curves act with finite order, but where each non--simple closed curve eventually acts with infinite…
Ordinary maps satisfy topological recursion for a certain spectral curve $(x, y)$. We solve a conjecture from arXiv:1710.07851 that claims that fully simple maps, which are maps with non self-intersecting disjoint boundaries, satisfy…
We prove two results on some special generators of finite simple groups and use them to prove that every non-abelian finite simple group $S$ admits a non-congruence presentation (as conjectured in [CLT24]), and that if $S$ has a non-trivial…
We show that the Simple Loop Conjecture holds for any representation $\rho\colon\pi_1(S)\longrightarrow \text{PSL}(2,\,\mathbb R)$ that is discrete but not faithful. That is, we show the existence of a simple closed curve in the kernel of…
We study when the mapping class group of an infinite-type surface $S$ admits an action with unbounded orbits on a connected graph whose vertices are simple closed curves on $S$. We introduce a topological invariant for infinite-type…
We give a new proof of a theorem of D. Calegari that says that the Cayley graph of a surface group with respect to any generating set lying in finitely many mapping class group orbits has infinite diameter. This applies, for instance, to…
It is shown that various questions about the existence of simple closed curves in normal subgroups of surface groups are undecidable.