Bounding deformation spaces of Kleinian groups with two generators

In this article we provide simple and provable bounds on the size and shape of the quasiconformal deformation space of the groups ₚ*q, the free product of cyclic groups of order p and q, in (2, ) for 3 p, q. Though simple, these bounds are sharp, meeting the highly fractal boundary of the deformation space in four cusp groups. Such bounds have great utility in computer assisted searches for extremal Kleinian groups so as to identify universal constraints (volume, length spectra, etc) on the geometry and topology of hyperbolic 3-orbifolds. As an application, we prove a strengthened version of a conjecture by Morier-Genoud, Ovsienko, and Veselov on the faithfulness of the specialised Burau representation.