Quaternionic covers and monodromy of the Kontsevich-Zorich cocycle in orthogonal groups (Q679668)

A square-tiled surface, or origami, \(M\) is a finite cover of the flat torus \(\mathbb C/\mathbb Z[i]\), branched over \(0\). To specify such a surface with \(n\) squares, one needs two permutations, \(\sigma_h, \sigma_v \in S_n\), telling you how to glue the horizontal and vertical sides of the \(n\) squares respectively (namely, the right side of square \(i\) is glued to the left of \(\sigma_v(i)\), and the top of square \(j\) is glued to the bottom of \(\sigma_h(j)\)). The resulting surface is connected if the group \(\langle \sigma_h, \sigma_v\rangle\) acts transitively on \(\{1, 2, \ldots, n\}\). By pulling back the complex structure and the holomorphic one-form \(dz\) from the torus, one obtains both a Riemann surface structure and an holomorphic one-form on \(M\), giving it the structure of a translation surface (equivalently, you can just see it as made up of polygons with parallel sides glued by translation). These surfaces are a very important source of examples in the study of the \({\mathrm{SL}}(2, \mathbb R)\) action on the space of translation surfaces. They are rational points in natural period coordinates, have closed \({\mathrm {SL}}(2, \mathbb R)\)-orbits and have very interesting properties. Associated to these closed \({\mathrm {SL}}(2, \mathbb R)\)-orbits, which can be identified with \({\mathrm {SL}}(2, \mathbb R)/\Gamma\), where \(\Gamma\) is commensurable to \({\mathrm {SL}}(2, \mathbb Z)\), is a cocycle over the natural action of \({\mathrm {SL}}(2, \mathbb R)\), namely, the action on the bundle whose fibers are the absolute homology of the surface. This cocycle, known as the Kontsevich-Zorich cocycle, captures important information about the dynamics on the moduli space and of the dynamical properties of flows on these surfaces. In general, the cocycle takes values in \({\mathrm {Sp}}(2g, \mathbb Z)\), where \(g\) is the genus of the surface. It is of great interest to see what the image of \(\Gamma\) under this monodromy map is. In this paper, using detailed algebraic and combinatorial constructions, the authors observe a new phenomenon: they build a genus-11 square-tiled surfaces so the Zariski closure of (a factor of) the monodromy group is equal to the group \({\mathrm {SO}}^*(6)\). Remarkably, much of this is proved by direct computation of matrices!