Bad irreducible subgroups and singular locus for character varieties in $PSL(p,\mathbb{C})$

Abstract

We describe the centralizer of irreducible representations from a finitely generated group $\Gamma$ to $PSL(p,\mathbb{C})$ where $p$ is a prime number. This leads to a description of the singular locus (the set of conjugacy classes of representations whose centralizer strictly contains the center of the ambient group) of the irreducible part of the character variety $\chi^i(\Gamma,PSL(p,\mathbb{C}))$. When $\Gamma$ is a free group of rank $l\geq 2$ or the fundamental group of a closed Riemann surface of genus $g\geq 2$, we give a complete description of this locus and prove that this locus is exactly the set of algebraic singularities of the irreducible part of the character variety.