The probabilistic nature of McShane's identity: planar tree coding of simple loops

In this article, we discuss a probabilistic interpretation of McShane's identity as describing a finite measure on the space of embedded paths though a point.Comment: 25 page

New Identities for small hyperbolic surfaces

Luo and Tan gave a new identity for hyperbolic surfaces with/without geodesic boundary in terms of dilogarithms of the lengths of simple closed geodesics on embedded three-holed spheres or one-holed tori. However, the identity was trivial for a hyperbolic one-holed torus with geodesic boundary. In this paper we adapt the argument from Luo and Tan to give an identity for hyperbolic tori with one geodesic boundary or cusp in terms of dilogarithm functions on the set of lengths of simple closed geodesics on the torus. As a corollary, we are also able to express the Luo-Tan identity as a sum over all immersed three-holed spheres $P$ which are embeddings when restricted to the interior of $P$.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

McShane's Identity in Rank One Symmetric Spaces

In this paper we study McShane's identity in real and complex hyperbolic spaces and obtain various generalizations of the identity for representations of surface groups into the isometry groups of rank one symmetric spaces. Our methods unify most of the existing methods used in the existing literature for proving this class of identities.Comment: 27 page

The complement of the Bowditch space in the SL(2,C) character variety

Let ${\mathcal X}$ be the space of type-preserving \SL(2,C) characters of the punctured torus $T$. The Bowditch space ${\mathcal X}_{BQ}$ is the largest open subset of ${\mathcal X}$ on which the mapping class group acts properly discontinuously, this is characterized by two simple conditions called the $BQ$-conditions. In this note, we show that $[\rho]$ is in the interior of the complement of ${\mathcal X}_{BQ}$ if there exists an essential simple closed curve $X$ on $T$ such that $|{\rm tr} \rho(X)|<0.5$.Comment: 6 page

The diagonal slice of Schottky space

An irreducible representation of the free group on two generators X,Y into SL(2,C) is determined up to conjugation by the traces of X,Y and XY. We study the diagonal slice of representations for which X,Y and XY have equal trace. Using the three-fold symmetry and Keen-Series pleating rays we locate those groups which are free and discrete, in which case the resulting hyperbolic manifold is a genus-2 handlebody. We also compute the Bowditch set, consisting of those representations for which no primitive elements in the group generated by X,Y are parabolic or elliptic, and at most finitely many have trace with absolute value at most 2. In contrast to the quasifuchsian punctured torus groups originally studied by Bowditch, computer graphics show that this set is significantly different from the discreteness locus.Comment: 44 pages, 14 figure