Deformation of hyperbolic manifolds in 𝑃𝐺𝐿(𝑛,𝐂) and discreteness of the peripheral representations

Abstract

Let M M be a cusped hyperbolic 3 3 -manifold, e.g. a knot complement. Thurston showed that the space of deformations of its fundamental group in P G L ( 2 , C ) \mathrm {PGL}(2,\mathbf {C}) (up to conjugation) is of complex dimension the number ν \nu of cusps near the hyperbolic representation. It seems natural to ask whether some representations remain discrete after deformation. The answer is generically not. A simple reason for it lies inside the cusps: the degeneracy of the peripheral representation (i.e. representations of fundamental groups of the ν \nu peripheral tori). They indeed generically become non-discrete, except for a countable set. This last set corresponds to hyperbolic Dehn surgeries on M M , for which the peripheral representation is no more faithful. We work here in the framework of P G L ( n , C ) \mathrm {PGL}(n,\mathbf {C}) . The hyperbolic structure lifts, via the n n -dimensional irreducible representation, to a representation ρ g e o m \rho _{\mathrm {geom}} . We know from the work of Menal-Ferrer and Porti that the space of deformations of ρ geom \rho _{\textrm {geom}} has complex dimension ( n − 1 ) ν (n-1)\nu . We prove here that, unlike the P G L ( 2 ) \mathrm {PGL}(2) -case, the generic behaviour becomes the discreteness (and faithfulness) of the peripheral representation: in a neighbourhood of the geometric representation, the non-discrete peripheral representations are contained in a real analytic subvariety of codimension ≥ 1 \geq 1 .