Faithfulness of the Lawrence representation of braid groups

In this paper we survey some work on representations of $B_n$ given by the induced action on a homology module of some space. One of these, called the Lawrence-Krammer representation, recently came to prominence when it was shown to be faithful for all $n$. We will outline the methods used, applying them to a closely related representation for which the proof is slightly easier. The main tool is the Blanchfield pairing, a sesquilinear pairing between elements of relative homo...

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.

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.

The Lawrence-Krammer representation of the braid groups recently came to prominence when it was shown to be faithful by myself and Krammer. It is an action of the braid group on a certain homology module $H_2(\tilde{C})$ over the ring of Laurent polynomials in $q$ and $t$. In this paper we describe some surfaces in $\tilde{C}$ representing elements of homology. We use these to give a new proof that $H_2(\tilde{C})$ is a free module. We also show that the $(n-2,2)$ representat...

Let $C_n$ be the group of conjugating automorphisms. We study the representation $\rho$ of $C_n$, an extension of Lawrence-Krammer representation of the braid group $B_n$, defined by Valerij G. Bardakov. As Bardakov proved that the representation $\rho$ is unfaithful for $n \geq 5$, the cases $n=3,4$ remain open. In our work, we make attempts towards the faithfulness of $\rho$ in the case $n=3$.

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 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...

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...

We give an exposition of the work of Bigelow and Krammer who proved that the Artin braid groups are linear.