Fundamental classes of 3-manifold group representations in SL(4,R)

Abstract

We compute the fundamental class (in the extended Bloch group) for representations of fundamental groups of 3-manifolds to SL(4,R) that factor over SL(2,C), in particular for those factoring over the isomorphism PSL(2,C) = S0(3,1). We also discuss consequences for the number of connected components of SL(4,R)-character varieties, and we show that there are knots with arbitrarily many components of vanishing Chern-Simons invariant in their SL(n,C)-character varieties

final version to appear in JKTR