A family of representations of braid groups on surfaces

We show that the Lawrence--Krammer representation can be obtained as the quantization of the symmetric square of the Burau representation. This connection allows us to construct new representations of braid groups

A very popular problem on braid groups has recently been solved by Bigelow and Krammer, namely, they have found a faithful linear representation for the braid group B_n. In their papers, Bigelow and Krammer suggested that their representation is the monodromy representation of a certain fibration. Our goal in this paper is to understand this monodromy representation using standard tools from the theory of hyperplane arrangements. In particular, we prove that the representatio...

This article is a survey on the braid groups, the Artin groups, and the Garside groups. It is a presentation, accessible to non-experts, of various topological and algebraic aspects of these groups. It is also a report on three points of the theory: the faithful linear representations, the cohomology, and the geometrical representations.

This work presents an approach towards the representation theory of the braid groups $B_n$. We focus on finite-dimensional representations over the field of Laurent series which can be obtained from representations of infinitesimal braids, with the help of Drinfeld associators. We set a dictionary between representation-theoretic properties of these two structures, and tools to describe the representations thus obtained. We give an explanation for the frequent apparition of u...

For any n>3, we give a family of finite dimensional irreducible representations of the braid group B_n. Moreover, we give a subfamily parametrized by 0<m<n of dimension the combinatoric number (n,m). The representation obtained in the case m=1 is equivalent to the Standard representation.

We study homological representations of mapping class groups, including the braid groups. These arise from the twisted homology of certain configuration spaces, and come in many different flavours. Our goal is to give a unified general account of the fundamental relationships (non-degenerate pairings, embeddings, isomorphisms) between the many different flavours of homological representations. Our motivating examples are the Lawrence-Bigelow representations of the braid group...

In the present paper, we construct a variant of the Burau representation of two generalizations of the classical braid group. For the Gassner representation, we propose an iterative procedure to find and generalize the extension of this representation.

The Lawrence representation $L_{n,m}$ is a family of homological representation of the braid group $B_n$, which specializes to the reduced Burau and the Lawrence-Krammer representation when $m$ is 1 and 2. In this article we show that the Lawrence representation is faithful for $m \geq 2$.

We study the Burau representation of the braid group $B_n$ in the case where $n=3$. We give three novel topological proofs that the Burau representation of $B_3$ is faithful, and a proof that it's faithful modulo $p$ for all integers $p>1$. We then classify conjugacy classes in the image of the Burau representation in $\text{GL}(2, \mathbb{Z}[t, t^{-1}])$ in a way that takes account of the fact that braids are geometrically oriented, and use that fact to give a new, linear ti...

Given a representation $\varphi \colon B_n \to G_n$ of the braid group $B_n$, $n \geq 2$ into a group $G_n$, we are considering the problem of whether it is possible to extend this representation to a representation $\Phi \colon SM_n \to A_n$, where $SM_n$ is the singular braid monoid and $A_n$ is an associative algebra, in which the group of units contains $G_n$. We also investigate the possibility of extending the representation $\Phi \colon SM_n \to A_n$ to a representatio...