Spaces of surface group representations (Q493112)

Let \(M\) and \(X\) be manifolds. A representation \(\rho:\pi_{1}(M)\rightarrow \text{Homeo}_{+}(X)\) is geometric if it is faithful and has discrete image contained in a finite-dimensional Lie group \(G\subset\text{ Homeo}_{+}(X)\) acting transitively on \(X.\) The typical example of such a representation is that any complete \((G,X)\) structure on a manifold \(M\) defines a geometric representation \(\rho:\pi_{1}(M)\rightarrow G\subset\text{ Homeo}_{+}(X).\) In the present paper the author studies the case \(M=\Sigma_{g}\) and \(X=S^{1},\) where \(\Sigma_{g}\) is a closed surface of genus \(g\geq2.\) Let \(\Gamma_{g}=\pi_{1}(\Sigma_{g}).\) In the first theorem of the paper the rigidity of the geometric representations \(\Gamma_{g}\rightarrow \text{Homeo}_{+}(S^{1})\) is proven. This result is stated as follows: let \(g\geq2\), and let \(\rho\) be a geometric representation in \(\Hom(\Gamma_{g},\text{Homeo}_{+}(S^{1})).\) Then the connected component of \(\rho\) in \(\Hom(\Gamma_{g},\text{Homeo}_{+}(S^{1}))\) consists of a single semi-conjugacy class. A second interesting result of the paper is related with the study of rotation numbers of elements in the image of the representation \(\rho.\) For each \(\gamma\in\Gamma_{g}\) the mapping \(rot_{\gamma}:\Hom(\Gamma_{g},\text{Homeo}_{+} (S^{1}))\rightarrow\mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Z}\) is defined by \(rot_{\gamma} (\rho)=rot(\rho(\gamma)),\) where \(rot(\cdot)\) is the usually defined rotation number of orientation preserving homeomorphisms of \(S^{1}.\) Thus, the following strong form of rigidity is proven: let \(\gamma\in\Gamma_{g}\) and let \(X\subset \Hom(\Gamma_{g},\text{Homeo}_{+}(S^{1}))\) be a connected component containing a geometric representation. Then \(rot_{\gamma}\) is constant on \(X\).