Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Mcshane’s Identity and Variations

Abstract

Greg McShane introduced a remarkable identity for lengths of simple closed geodesics on the once punctured torus with a complete, finite volume hyperbolic structure. Bowditch later generalized this and gave sufficient conditions for the identity to hold for general type-preserving representations of a free group on two generators Γ to SL(2,C), this was further generalized by the authors to obtain sufficient conditions for a generalized McShane’s identity to hold for arbitrary (not necessarily type-preserving) non-reducible representations in Tan et al. (Submitted). Here we extend the above by giving necessary and sufficient conditions for the generalized McShane identity to hold (Akiyoshi, Miyachi and Sakuma had proved it for type-preserving representations). We also give a version of Bowditch’s variation of McShane’s identity to once-punctured torus bundles, in the case where the monodromy is generated by a reducible element, and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the variations to hold.