Shapes of hyperbolic triangles and once-punctured torus groups

Abstract

AbstractLet $$\Delta $$ Δ be a hyperbolic triangle with a fixed area $$\varphi $$ φ . We prove that for all but countably many $$\varphi $$ φ , generic choices of $$\Delta $$ Δ have the property that the group generated by the $$\pi $$ π -rotations about the midpoints of the sides of the triangle admits no nontrivial relations. By contrast, we show for all $$\varphi \in (0,\pi ){\setminus }\mathbb {Q}\pi $$ φ ∈ ( 0 , π ) \ Q π , a dense set of triangles does afford nontrivial relations, which in the generic case map to hyperbolic translations. To establish this fact, we study the deformation space $$\mathfrak {C}_\theta $$ C θ of singular hyperbolic metrics on a torus with a single cone point of angle $$\theta =2(\pi -\varphi )$$ θ = 2 ( π - φ ) , and answer an analogous question for the holonomy map $$\rho _\xi $$ ρ ξ of such a hyperbolic structure $$\xi $$ ξ . In an appendix by Gao, concrete examples of $$\theta $$ θ and $$\xi \in \mathfrak {C}_\theta $$ ξ ∈ C θ are given where the image of each $$\rho _\xi $$ ρ ξ is finitely presented, non-free and torsion-free; in fact, those images will be isomorphic to the fundamental groups of closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds.