Boundary slopes and the logarithmic limit set (Q1765332)

In the mid-1980's, Culler and Shalen began investigating the character varieties of compact oriented 3-manifolds with boundary. This work has developed many powerful off-shoots, including the development of the A-polynomial of compact, orientable, irreducible 3-manifolds with boundary a single torus in [\textit{D. Cooper, M. Culler, H. Gillett, D. D. Long} and \textit{P. B. Shalen}, Invent. Math. 118, 47--84 (1994; Zbl 0842.57013)]. The A-polynomial has proven to be a powerful invariant with many nice properties. One of these is that the slopes of the Newton polygon of the A-polynomial are boundary slopes of incompressible surfaces in the 3-manifold. In the paper reviewed here, the author extends the notion of an A-polynomial to an eigenvalue variety of a compact, orientable, irreducible 3-manifold with boundary a finite collection of tori. Moreover he shows that the logarithmic limit set, defined in [\textit{G. M. Bergman}, Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 157, 459--470 (1971; Zbl 0212.53001)], of the eigenvalue variety plays an analogous role in detecting boundary slopes to that of the Newton polygon of the A-polynomial.