Metabelian \(SL(n,C)\) representations of knot groups (Q953144)

It is known that abelian representations of a knot group provide little information about the knot. Among the nonabelian representations, the simplest are the metabelian representations, i.e. those that are trivial on the second commutator subgroup of the knot group. In this paper, the authors study irreducible metabelian \(\text{SL}(n,\mathbb C)\) and \(\text{GL}(n,\mathbb C)\) representations of knot groups. They give the higher rank generalizations of a result of Nagasato who recently studied irreducible metabelian \(\text{SL}(2,\mathbb C)\) representations of knot groups and gave a count for the number of conjugacy classes of such representations. Moreover, the authors generalize the fact that every irreducible metabelian \(\text{SL}(n,\mathbb C)\) representation is conjugate to a unitary one. Finally, they prove that any knot with non trivial Alexander polynomial admits infinitely many irreducible pairwise nonconjugate metabelian \(\text{SL}(n,\mathbb C)\) representations.