Geometric structures associated to triangulations as fixed point sets of involutions (Q870234): Difference between revisions

In a famous construction described in his Princeton 1979 Lecture Notes, Thurston constructed hyperbolic structures on link complements by using ideal triangulations of these 3-manifolds. Recently, the author of the paper under review constructed spherical CR structures (that is, structures locally modeled on the Heisenberg group) on the complement of the figure eight knot and of the Whitehead link, also by using ideal triangulations, cf. [\textit{E. Falbel}, A spherical CR structure on the complement of the figure eight knot with discrete holonomy, preprint (2005)]. In the paper under review, the author makes a relation between these two constructions by giving a common framework to both hyperbolic and spherical CR geometries. He starts with a triangulation of a 3-manifold and he associates to each simplex a complex invariant. There is a set of equations that these invariants must satisfy that depends on the combinatorics of the triangulation. The set of solutions is called a \textbf{T}-structure. The author shows that both hyperbolic structures and spherical CR structures are contained in fixed point sets of two different involutions in the space of \textbf{T}-structures. He mentions that natural instances of \textbf{T}-structures arise from representations of the fundamental group of the 3-manifold in \(\text{PSL}(2,\mathbb{C})\) or in \(\text{PU}(2,1)\).