A spherical CR structure on the complement of the figure eight knot with discrete holonomy

Abstract

We describe a general geometrical construction of representations of fundamental groups of 3-manifolds into PU(2,1) and eventually of spherical CR structures defined on those 3-manifolds. We construct branched spherical CR structures on the complement of the figure eight knot and the Whitehead link. They have discrete holonomies contained in PU(2, 1, ℤ[ω]) and PU(2, 1,ℤ[i]) respectively.