Word maps and word maps with constants of simple algebraic groups

In the present paper, we consider word maps w: G ^m → G and word maps with constants w _Σ: G ^m → G of a simple algebraic group G, where w is a nontrivial word in the free group F _m of rank m, w _Σ = w ₁ σ ₁ w ₂ ··· w _r σ _r w _{r + 1}, w ₁, …, w _{r + 1} ∈ F _m , w ₂, …, w _r ≠ 1, Σ = {σ ₁, …, σ _r | σ _i ∈ G Z(G)}. We present results on the images of such maps, in particular, we prove a theorem on the dominance of “general” word maps with constants, which can be viewed as an analogue of a well-known theorem of Borel on the dominance of genuine word maps. Besides, we establish a relationship between the existence of unipotents in the image of a word map and the structure of the representation variety R(Γ_w, G) of the group Γ_w = F _m /<w>.