Character variety of the five-punctured sphere and the determinantal quintic hypersurface

Abstract: Using skein-theoretic methods, we study the SL2(C) character variety of the five-punctured sphere with arbitrary conjugacy class at each of the five punctures. We show that a Fricke-Klein-Vogt-type relation is realized as a symmetric determinantal hypersurface. We also give a realization of the character variety in terms of cluster variables. We explicitly derive the Poisson structure of the simple closed curves on the surface, and prove that cluster mutations induce automorphisms of the character variety.