Representations of braid groups

We study the kernel of the evaluated Burau representation through the braid element $\sigma_i \sigma_{i+1} \sigma_i$. The element is significant as a part of the standard braid relation. We establish the form of this element's image raised to the $n^{th}$ power. Interestingly, the cyclotomic polynomials arise and can be used to define the expression. The main result of this paper is that the Burau representation of the braid group of $n$ strands for $n \geq 3$ is unfaithful a...

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.

For groups of a topological origin, such as braid groups and mapping class groups, an important source of interesting and highly non-trivial representations is given by their actions on the twisted homology of associated spaces; these are known as homological representations. Representations of this kind have proved themselves especially important for the question of linearity, a key example being the family of topologically-defined representations introduced by Lawrence and ...

This article gives certain fibre bundles associated to the braid groups which are obtained from a translation as well as conjugation on the complex plane. The local coefficient systems on the level of homology for these bundles are given in terms of the determinant of the Burau representation. De Concini, Procesi, and Salvetti [Topology 40 (2001) 739--751] considered the cohomology of the n-th braid group B_n with local coefficients obtained from the determinant of the Bura...

The reduced Burau representation $V_n$ of the braid group $B_n$ is obtained from the action of $B_n$ on the homology of an infinite cyclic cover of the $n$-punctured disc. In this note, we calculate $H_*(B_n;V_n)$ as a module over the Laurent polynomial ring $\mathbb{Q}[t,t^{-1}]$.

In this paper we consider the cohomology of four groups related to the virtual braids of [Kauffman] and [Goussarov-Polyak-Viro], namely the pure and non-pure virtual braid groups (PvB_n and vB_n, respectively), and the pure and non-pure flat braid groups (PfB_n and fB_n, respectively). The cohomologies of PvB_n and PfB_n admit an action of the symmetric group S_n. We give a description of the cohomology modules H^i(PvB_n,Q) and H^i(PfB_n,Q) as sums of S_n-modules induced from...

Burau representation of the Artin braid group remains as one of the very important representations for the braid group. Partly, because of its connections to the Alexander polynomial which is one of the first and most useful invariants for knots and links. In the present work, we show that interesting representations of braid group could be achieved using a simple and intuitive approach, where we simply analyse the path of strands in a braid and encode the over-crossings, und...

This paper is the first part of a series of papers aimed at improving the classification by Formanek of the irreducible representations of Artin braid groups of small dimension. In this paper we classify all the irreducible complex representations $\rho$ of Artin braid group $B_n$ with the condition $rank (\rho (\sigma_i)-1)=2$ where $\sigma_i$ are the standard generators. For $n \geq 7$ they all belong to some one-parameter family of $n$-dimensional representations.

We study representations of the loop braid group $LB_n$ from the perspective of extending representations of the braid group $B_n$. We also pursue a generalization of the braid/Hecke/Temperlely-Lieb paradigm---uniform finite dimensional quotient algebras of the loop braid group algebras.

We classify an action of the $n$-strand braid group on the free group of rank $n$ which is similar to the Artin representation in the sense that the $i$-th generator $\sigma_{i}$ of $B_{n}$ acts so that it fixes all free generators $x_{j}$ except $j = i,i+1$. We determine all such representations and discuss knot invariants coming from such representations.