The Sl(2, )-Character Variety of a Montesinos Knot

Abstract

For each Montesinos knot K, we propose an efficient method to explicitly determine the irreducible SL(2, )-character variety, and show that it can be decomposed as χ0(K)⊔χ1(K)⊔χ2(K)⊔χ'(K), where χ0(K) consists of trace-free characters χ1(K) consists of characters of “unions” of representations of rational knots (or rational link, which appears at most once), χ2(K) is an algebraic curve, and χ'(K) consists of finitely many points when K satisfies a generic condition.