E-series of character varieties of non-orientable surfaces

Abstract

In this paper we are interested in two kinds of (stacky) character varieties associated to a compact non-orientable surface. (A) We consider the quotient stack of the space of representations of the fundamental group of this surface to GL(n). (B) We choose a set of k-punctures on the surface and a generic k-tuple of semisimple conjugacy classes of GL(n), and we consider the stack of anti-invariant local systems on the orientation cover of the surface with local monodromies around the punctures given by the prescribed conjugacy classes. We compute the number of points of these spaces over finite fields from which we get a formula for their E-series (a certain specialization of the mixed Poincare series). In case (B) we give a conjectural formula for the full mixed Poincare series.