Lectures on representations of surface groups (Q387961)

From the introduction: The purpose of this lecture series is to describe the ``representation variety'' -- or ``character variety'' -- of the fundamental group \(\pi_1(S)\) of a closed connected surface \(S\) of genus greater than 2, with values in a Lie group \(G\). This character variety is roughly defined to be \[ \mathrm {Rep}(\pi_1(S), G) := \mathrm {Hom}(\pi_1(S), G)/ G, \] where \(G\) acts on \(\mathrm {Hom}(\pi_1(S), G)\) by conjugation. In the preliminary chapters, we give a crash course on surfaces, vector bundles and connections. We then describe the smooth structure of these character varieties as well as their tangent spaces. To explain the volume form on these tangent spaces we need to, following Witten, introduce the Reidemeister torsion. When \(G = \mathrm {PSL}(2, \mathbb R)\), we prove the Milnor-Wood inequality and discuss the connected components of the character variety. We finally introduce the symplectic structure on these character varieties and prove Witten's formula, which computes their symplectic volume in the case of compact groups. We introduce two important algebras of observables, the first one consisting of Wilson loops or the other of spin networks, and compute their Poisson bracket, thus introducing the Goldman algebra. In the last chapter, we turn to the integrality of the symplectic form and the relation with 3-manifolds and the Chern-Simons invariant. Each chapter ends with a section giving general references for further reading.