Character varieties with Zariski closures of GL_n-conjugacy classes at punctures

Abstract: In a previous paper (joint with Hausel and Rodriguez-Villegas) we gave a conjectural formula for the mixed Hodge polynomials of character varieties with generic semisimple conjugacy classes at punctures and we prove a formula for the E-polynomial. We also proved that these character varieties are irreducible. In this paper we extend the above results to character varieties with Zariski closures of arbitrary generic conjugacy classes at punctures working with intersection cohomology. We also study Weyl group action on the intersection cohomology of the partial resolutions of these character varieties and give a conjectural formula for the two-variables polynomials that encode the trace of the elements of the Weyl group on the subquotients of the weight filtration. Finally, we compute the generating function of the stack count of character varieties with Zariski closure of unipotent regular conjugacy class at punctures.