Questions about the dynamics on a natural family of affine cubic surfaces

Abstract

We present several questions about the dynamics of the group of holomorphic automorphisms of the affine cubic surfaces $$S_{A,B,C,D} = \{(x,y,z) \in \mathbb{C}^3 \, : \, x^2 + y^2 + z^2 +xyz = Ax + By+Cz+D\},$$ where $A,B,C,$ and $D$ are complex parameters. This group action describes the monodromy of the famous Painlev\'e 6 Equation as well as the natural dynamics of the mapping class group on the ${\rm SL}(2,\mathbb{C})$ character varieties associated to the once punctured torus and the four times punctured sphere. The questions presented here arose while preparing our work ``Dynamics of groups of automorphisms of character varieties and Fatou/Julia decomposition for Painlev\'e~6'' \cite{RR} and during informal discussions with many people. Several of the questions were posed at the Simons Symposium on Algebraic, Complex and Arithmetic Dynamics that was held at Schloss Elmau, Germany, in August 2022 as well as the MINT Summer School ``Facets of Complex Dynamics'' that was held in Toulouse, France, in June 2023.