The degree of the special linear characters of a rank two free group. (Q735054)

Let \(F_n\) be the free group on \(n\) generators. For a word \(W\in F_n\) the special linear character is the complex-valued function on the set of all representations of \(F_n\), \[ w\colon\Hom(F_n,\text{SL}(2,\mathbb{C}))\to\mathbb{C},\quad w(\varrho)=\text{tr\,}\varrho(W), \] (where upper case letters are used for elements of \(F_n\) and their lower case version is used for the corresponding special linear character). In [Commun. Pure Appl. Math. 25, 635-649 (1972; Zbl 1184.20009)] it is proved by \textit{R. D. Horowitz} that for any \(W\in F_n\), \(w\) can be written as an integer polynomial in ``Horowitz generators''. This polynomial is unique modulo an ideal, which is trivial for \(n=2\). So, for \(W\in F_2=\langle X,Y\rangle\), the character \(w\in\mathbb{Z}[x,y,z]\), where \(x,y,z\) are the special linear characters corresponding to \(X,Y,XY\), respectively. The calculation of this polynomial for an arbitrary \(W\in F_n\) is quite difficult. In this paper the author calculates the polynomial degree of the special linear character of an element \(W\in F_2\) and the leading monomial of this polynomial. For an element \(W\in F_2\) one can reshape it to obtain another word within its character class. This `normalization' of \(W\) is obtained via a process of cyclic reduction, cyclic permutation, and inversion, so the character class of \(W\) is represented by a word of the form \(\overline W=X^{\lambda_1}Y^{\lambda_2}X^{\lambda_3}\cdots X^{\lambda_{n-1}}Y^{\lambda_n}\), where each \(\lambda_i\) is a non-zero integer and \(n\) is either 1 or even. Each \(X^{\lambda_i}\) (or \(Y^{\lambda_i}\)) is a syllable of \(\overline W\). Let \(sl(\overline W)\) denote the number of syllables in \(\overline W\) and \(\xi_W\) denote the number of distinct maximal negative subwords of \(W\). Theorem: Suppose that \(W\in F_2\) has a normalized representative of the form \[ \overline W=X^{\lambda_1}Y^{\lambda_2}X^{\lambda_3}\cdots X^{\lambda_{n-1}}Y^{\lambda_n} \] with syllable length at least two. Then the degree of \(w\in\mathbb{Z}[x,y,z]\) is \(\deg(w)=\frac{sl(\overline W)}{2}+\xi_W+\sum_{i=1}^n(|\lambda_i|-1)\). Furthermore, \(w\) has a unique monomial of largest total degree. The author also calculates the exponent of each of the coordinates \(x,y,z\) separately in the leading monomial of \(w\in\mathbb{Z}[x,y,z]\). The paper concludes with a discussion on the reasons why the techniques developed here can not be applied to a computation of the degree of the special character of \(W\in F_n\) for \(n>2\).