On high-dimensional representations of knot groups (Q679786)

It is well known that the character variety \(X(\pi_K,\text{SL}(n,\mathbb{C}))\) of any given knot \(K\) contains an \((n-1)\)-dimensional subvariety consisting of characters of abelian representations. A natural question is if this character variety contains a component with dimension \(\geq n\). Such a component is called high-dimensional. In the literature, some partial answers about the existence and non-existence of high-dimensional components of \(X(\pi_K,\text{SL}(n,\mathbb{C}))\) were given. In this paper, the authors prove that the \(\text{SL}(n,\mathbb{C})\)-character variety of every nontrivial knot admits high dimensional components for \(n\) sufficiently large. More precisely, given any \(N\in\mathbb{N}\), there exists an \(n\geq N\) such that \(X^{irr}(\pi_K,\text{SL}(n,\mathbb{C}))\) contains a high-dimensional component. In the case of the figure-eight knot, they obtain a refined quantitative result. Namely, for all \(n\in\mathbb{N}\), the character variety \(X(\pi_K,\text{SL}(n,\mathbb{C}))\) has a component which contains characters of irreducible representations and which is of dimension at least \(4n^2-1\).