Metabelian \(\mathrm{SL}(n,\mathbb C)\) representations of knot groups. II: Fixed points (Q618682)

An approach to the study of the fundamental group of the exterior of a knot is to study spaces of representations of the knot group. The metabelian representations have been of continuing interest since the 1960's. References for many works on the subject are provided in the introduction to the paper reviewed here. Most recently, the authors of the paper reviewed here provided a classification for irreducible metabelian representations in Part I [Pac. J. Math. 238, No.~1, 7--25 (2008; Zbl 1154.57004)]. The group \(\mathbb Z/n\) acts on the variety of representations in \(\text{SL}(n,\mathbb C)\) via twisting by \(n\)-th roots of unity; this action descends to an action on the character variety of the knot complement. The main result of this paper is that an irreducible representation is fixed by this action if and only if it is metabelian. This extends a result of \textit{F. Nagasato} and \textit{Y. Yamaguchi} in [On the geometry of a certain slice of the character variety of a knot group. preprint (2008), \url{arXiv 0807.0714}], where this result is proved for the case \(n = 2\). The authors apply their result to show that the twisted Alexander polynomial \(\Delta^{\alpha}_{K,1}(t)\) associated to an irreducible metabelian \(\text{SL}(n,\mathbb C)\) representation \(\alpha\) is actually a polynomial in \(t^n\), answering a conjecture of \textit{M. Hirasawa} and \textit{K. Mursagi} [Twisted Alexander polynomials of 2-bridge knots associated to metabelian representations. preprint (2009), \url{arXiv 0903.1689}].