Related papers: Closed surfaces and character varieties

We extend Culler and Shalen's construction of detecting essential surfaces in 3-manifolds to 3-orbifolds. We do so in the setting of the $\mathrm{SL}_2(\mathbb{C})$ character variety, and following Boyer and Zhang in the…

Closed essential surfaces in a three-manifold can be detected by ideal points of the character variety or by algebraic non-integral representations. We give examples of closed essential surfaces not detected in either of these ways. For…

Extending Culler-Shalen theory, Hara and the second author presented a way to construct certain kinds of branched surfaces in a $3$-manifold from an ideal point of a curve in the $\operatorname{SL}_n$-character variety. There exists an…

In the seminal work of Culler and Shalen from 1983, essential surfaces in 3-manifolds are associated to ideal points of their $\text{SL}_2(\mathbb{C})$-character varieties, and connections between the algebraic geometry of the character…

Culler-Shalen theory uses the algebraic geometry of the SL(2,C)-character variety of a 3-manifold to construct essential surfaces in the manifold. There are module structures associated to the coordinate rings of the irreducible components…

We describe a family of hyperbolic knots whose character variety contain exactly two distinct components of characters of irreducible representations. The intersection points between the components carry rich topological information. In…

In 1983 Culler and Shalen established a way to construct essential surfaces in a 3-manifold from ideal points of the $SL_2$-character variety associated to the 3-manifold group. We present in this article an analogous construction of…

In this paper, we use normal surface theory to study Dehn filling on a knot-manifold. First, it is shown that there is a finite computable set of slopes on the boundary of a knot-manifold that bound normal and almost normal surfaces in a…

A marked surface is a compact oriented surface equipped with some pairwise disjoint arcs embedded in its boundary. In this paper, we extend the notion of character varieties to marked surfaces, in such a way that they have a nice behaviour…

We count the number of isotopy classes of closed, connected, orientable, essential surfaces embedded in the exterior B of the knot K13n586.The main result is that the count of surfaces by genus is equal to the Euler totent function. This is…

In this paper we use character variety methods to study homomorphisms between the fundamental groups of 3-manifolds, in particular those induced by non-zero degree maps. A {\it knot manifold} is a compact, connected, irreducible, orientable…

We present a practical algorithm to test whether a 3-manifold given by a triangulation or an ideal triangulation contains a closed essential surface. This property has important theoretical and algorithmic consequences. As a testament to…

We prove a closed formula expressing any multiplicative characteristic class evaluated on the tangent bundle of the Hilbert schemes of points on a non-compact simply-connected surface. As a corollary, we deduce a closed formula for the…

We calculate relations on characteristic classes which are obstructions preventing closed K\"ahler manifolds from carrying holomorphic Cartan geometries. We apply these relations to give global constraints on the phase spaces of complex…

We study connections between the topology of generic character varieties of fundamental groups of punctured Riemann surfaces, Macdonald polynomials, quiver representations, Hilbert schemes on surfaces, modular forms and multiplicities in…

We present a new, practical algorithm to test whether a knot complement contains a closed essential surface. This property has important theoretical and algorithmic consequences; however, systematically testing it has until now been…

In this paper, we give a simple and geometric, but formal, description of an open subset of the character variety of surface groups into $\mathrm{SL}_n(\mathbb{C})$. The main ingredient is a modified version of the WKB method, which we call…

We define three different types of spanning surfaces for knots in thickened surfaces. We use these to introduce new Seifert matrices, Alexander-type polynomials, genera, and a signature invariant. One of these Alexander polynomials extends…

In this note we prove an effective characterization of when two finite-degree covers of a connected, orientable surface of negative Euler characteristic are isomorphic in terms of which curves have simple elevations, weakening the…

Holonomy invariants in strict higher gauge theory have been studied in depth, aiming to applications to higher Chern-Simons theory. For a flat 2-connection, the holonomy of surface knots of arbitrary genus has been defined and its…