On conformally flat circle bundles over surfaces

Abstract

We study surface groups $\Gamma$ in $SO(4,1)$, which is the group of Mobius tranformations of $S^3$, and also the group of isometries of ${\mathbb{H}}^4$. We consider such $\Gamma$ so that its limit set ${\Lambda }_{\Gamma }$ is a quasi-circle in $S^3$, and so that the quotient $(S^3-{\Lambda }_{\Gamma })/\Gamma$ is a circle bundle over a surface. This circle bundle is said to be conformally flat, and our main goal is to discover how twisted such bundle may be by establishing a bound on its Euler number. By combinatorial approaches, we have two soft bounds in this direction on certain types of nice structures. In this article we also construct new examples, a "grafting" type path in the space of surface group representations into $SO(4,1)$: starting inside the quasi-Fuschsian locus, going through non-discrete territory and back.

28 pages, 7 figures. Updated from Thesis version: more correct bound of (3/2)n^2, updated exposition in section 3.1