Decomposable representations and Lagrangian submanifolds of moduli spaces associated to surface groups

The importance of explicit examples of Lagrangian submanifolds of moduli spaces is revealed by papers such as Dostoglou and Salamon (Ann. of Math (2), 139(3), 581–640, 1994) and Salamon (Proceedings of the international congress of mathematicians, vol.1, 2 (Zürich, 1994), pp. 526–536. Birkhäuser, Basel, 1995): given a 3-manifold M with boundary ?M = Σ, Dostoglou and Salamon use such examples to obtain a proof of the Atiyah-Floer conjecture relating the symplectic Floer homology of the representation space Hom(π₁(Σ = ?M), U)/U (associated to an explicit pair of Lagrangian submanifolds of this representation space) and the instanton homology of the 3-manifold M. In the present paper, we construct a Lagrangian submanifold of the space of representations ${\mathcal{M}_{g,l}:=Hom_\mathcal{C}(\pi_{g,l}, U)/U}The importance of explicit examples of Lagrangian submanifolds of moduli spaces is revealed by papers such as Dostoglou and Salamon (Ann. of Math (2), 139(3), 581–640, 1994) and Salamon (Proceedings of the international congress of mathematicians, vol.1, 2 (Zürich, 1994), pp. 526–536. Birkh?user, Basel, 1995): given a 3-manifold M with boundary ∂M = Σ, Dostoglou and Salamon use such examples to obtain a proof of the Atiyah-Floer conjecture relating the symplectic Floer homology of the representation space Hom(π₁(Σ = ∂M), U)/U (associated to an explicit pair of Lagrangian submanifolds of this representation space) and the instanton homology of the 3-manifold M. In the present paper, we construct a Lagrangian submanifold of the space of representations of the fundamental group π _g,l of a punctured Riemann surface Σ _g,l into an arbitrary compact connected Lie group U. This Lagrangian submanifold is obtained as the fixed-point set of an anti-symplectic involution defined on . We show that the involution is induced by a form-reversing involution β defined on the quasi-Hamiltonian space . The fact that has a non-empty fixed-point set is a consequence of the real convexity theorem for group-valued momentum maps proved in Schaffhauser (A real convexity theorem for quasi-Hamiltonian actions, submitted, 25 p, 2007. ). The notion of decomposable representation provides a geometric interpretation of the Lagrangian submanifold thus obtained. Supported by the Japanese Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS).