On Krammer's Representation of the Braid Group

We define geodesic normal forms for the general series of complex reflection groups G(de,e,n). This requires the elaboration of a combinatorial technique in order to determine minimal word representatives and to compute the length of the elements of G(de,e,n) over some generating set. Using these geodesic normal forms, we construct intervals in G(e,e,n) that give rise to Garside groups. Some of these groups correspond to the complex braid group B(e,e,n). For the other Garside...

In his initial paper on braids E.Artin gave a presentation with two generators for an arbitrary braid group. We give analogues of this Artin's presentation for various generalizations of braids.

This paper gives a process for finding discrete real specializations of sesquilinear representations of the braid groups using Salem numbers. This method is applied to the Jones and BMW representations, and some details on the commensurability of the target groups are given.

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 $m \geq 2$.

The braid groups B_n can be defined as the mapping class group of the n-punctured disc. The Lawrence-Krammer representation of the braid group B_n is the induced action on a certain twisted second homology of the space of unordered pairs of points in the n-punctured disc. Recently, Daan Krammer showed that this is a faithful representation in the case n=4. In this paper, we show that it is faithful for all n.

A non-singular sesquilinear form is constructed that is preserved by the Lawrence-Krammer representation. It is shown that if the polynomial variables q and t of the Lawrence-Krammer representation are chosen to be appropriate algebraically independant unit complex numbers, then the form is negative-definite Hermitian. Since unitary matrices diagonalize, the conjugacy class of a matrix in the unitary group is determined by its eigenvalues. It is shown that the eigenvalues of ...

We study the representations of the commutator subgroup K_{n} of the braid group B_{n} into a finite group . This is done through a symbolic dynamical system. Some experimental results enable us to compute the number of subgroups of K_{n} of a given (finite) index, and, as a by-product, to recover the well known fact that every representation of K_{n} into S_{r}, with n > r, must be trivial.

An explicit isomorphism is constructed between the Birman-Wenzl algebra, defined algebraically by J. Birman and H. Wenzl using generators and relations, and the Kauffman algebra, constructed geometrically by H. R. Morton and P. Traczyk in terms of tangles. The isomorphism is obtained by constructing an explicit basis in the Birman-Wenzl algebra, analogous to a basis previously constructed for the Kauffman algebra using 'Brauer connectors'. The geometric isotopy arguments for ...

This paper provides a unified approach to results on representations of affine Hecke algebras, cyclotomic Hecke algebras, affine BMW algebras, cyclotomic BMW algebras, Markov traces, Jacobi-Trudi type identities, dual pairs (Zelevinsky), and link invariants (Turaev). The key observation in the genesis of this paper was that the technical tools used to obtain the results in Orellana and Suzuki, two a priori unrelated papers, are really the same. Here we develop this method and...

The paper defines a generic Birman-Wenzl algebra of Coxeter Type D and investigates its structure as a semi-simple algebra.