Ptolemy coordinates, Dehn invariant and the \(A\)-polynomial (Q284815)

In [\textit{S. Garoufalidis} et al., Duke Math. J. 164, No. 11, 2099--2160 (2015; Zbl 1335.57034)], the authors define the Ptolemy variety of a triangulated 3-manifold with boundary a union of tori. This variety is a subset of the vanishing set of the ideal generated by the so-called Ptolemy relations in a polynomial ring over \(\mathbb Q\), namely the set of points for which all coordinates are non-zero. This variety parameterizes the ``generically decorated'' boundary-unipotent representations \(\rho\) of the fundamental group of \(M\) in SL(\(n,\mathbb C\)) up to conjugation. (Here a decoration is a \(\rho\)-equivariant assignment of affine flags to the vertices of the simplices in the triangulation, and this is generic if a certain general position condition is met. Note that the existence of such a decoration is dependent upon the triangulation of the manifold.) One obtains a map from the Ptolemy variety into (but not necessarily onto) the space of boundary-unipotent representations modulo conjugacy. The Ptolemy variety has been explicitly computed for the SnapPy census manifolds, and the Cheeger-Chern-Simons invariants and the Bloch invariant of a representation can be determined from its Ptolemy coordinates. In the paper reviewed here, the author generalizes this work to create an analogous parameterization of conjugacy classes of generically decorated representations such that the image of each peripheral subgroup lies in a conjugate of the Borel subgroup of upper triangular matrices. The author defines a map from the variety to \((\mathbb C^*)^k\) for an appropriate \(k\). In the case of a single boundary component this yields the variety whose defining polynomial is the \(A\)-polynomial, so that this provides a new approach to computing the \(A\)-polynomial. Finally the author provides a formula for computing the Dehn invariant of an SL(\(n,\mathbb C\))-representation.