The Lawrence--Krammer representation is unitary

Let $C_n$ be the group of conjugating automorphisms. Valerij G. Bardakov defined a representation $\rho$ of $C_n$, which is an extension of Lawrence-Krammer representation of the braid group $B_n$. Bardakov proved that the representation $\rho$ is unfaithful for $n \geq 5$. The cases $n=3,4$ remain open. M. N. Nasser and M. N. Abdulrahim made attempts towards the faithfulness of $\rho$ in the case $n=3$. In this work, we prove that $\rho$ is unfaithful in the both cases $n=3$...

We investigate braid group representations associated with unitary braided vector spaces, focusing on a conjecture that such representations should have virtually abelian images in general and finite image provided the braiding has finite order. We verify this conjecture for the two infinite families of Gaussian and group-type braided vector spaces, as well as the generalization to quasi-braided vector spaces of group-type.

We give a method to produce representations of the braid group $B_n$ of $n-1$ generators ($n\leq \infty$). Moreover, we give sufficient conditions over a non unitary representation for being of this type. This method produces examples of irreducible representations of finite and infinite dimension.

Using the recoupling theory, we define a representation of the pure braid group and show that it is not trivial.

We use some Lie group theory and Budney's unitarization of the Lawrence-Krammer representation, to prove that for generic parameters of definite form the image of the representation (also on certain types of subgroups) is dense in the unitary group. This implies that, except possibly for closures of full-twist braids, all links have infinitely many conjugacy classes of braid representations on any non-minimal number of (and at least 4) strands.

We propose a family of new representations of the braid groups on surfaces that extend linear representations of the braid groups on a disc such as the Burau representation and the Lawrence-Krammer-Bigelow representation.

In this note, a new class of representations of the braid groups $B_{N}$ is constructed. It is proved that those representations contain three kinds of irreducible representations: the trivial (identity) one, the Burau one, and an $N$-dimensional one. The explicit form of the $N$-dimensional irreducible representation of the braid group $B_{N}$ is given here.

We construct representations of the braid groups B_n on n strands on free Z[q,q^-1,s,s^-1]-modules W_{n,l} using generic Verma modules for an integral version of quantum sl_2. We prove that the W_{n,2} are isomorphic to the faithful Lawrence Krammer Bigelow representations of B_n after appropriate identification of parameters of Laurent polynomial rings by constructing explicit integral bases and isomorphism. We also prove that the B_n-representations W_{n,l} are irreducible ...

We determine the Zariski closure of the representations of the braid groups that factorize through the Birman-Wenzl-Murakami algebra, for generic values of the parameters $\alpha,s$. For $\alpha,s$ of modulus 1 and close to 1, we prove that these representations are unitarizable, thus deducing the topological closure of the image when in addition $\alpha,s$ are algebraically independent.

Matrix transposition induces an involution on the isomorphism classes of semi-simple n-dimensional representations of the three string braid group. We show that a connected component of this variety can detect braid-reversion or that the involution acts as the identity on it. We classify the fixed-point components.