Character varieties of a transitioning Coxeter 4-orbifold

Abstract

In 2010, Kerckhoff and Storm discovered a path of hyperbolic 4-polytopes eventually collapsing to an ideal right-angled cuboctahedron. This is expressed by a deformation of the inclusion of a discrete reflection group (a right-angled Coxeter group) in the isometry group of hyperbolic 4-space. More recently, we have shown that the path of polytopes can be extended to Anti-de Sitter geometry so as to have geometric transition on a naturally associated 4-orbifold, via a transitional half-pipe structure. In this paper, we study the hyperbolic, Anti-de Sitter, and half-pipe character varieties of Kerckhoff and Storm’s right-angled Coxeter group near each of the found holonomy representations, including a description of the singularity that appears at the collapse. An essential tool is the study of some rigidity properties of right-angled cusp groups in dimension four.