Representations of the Necklace Braid Group: Topological and Combinatorial Approaches Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • 2019, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature. The necklace braid group NB n is the motion group of the n+ 1 component necklace link L n in Euclidean R 3 . Here L n consists of n pairwise unlinked Euclidean circles each linked to an auxiliary circle. Partially motivated by physical considerations, we study representations of the necklace braid group NB n , especially those obtained as extensions of representations of the braid group B n and the loop braid group LB n . We show that any irreducible B n representation extends to NB n in a standard way. We also find some non-standard extensions of several well-known B n -representations such as the Burau and LKB representations. Moreover, we prove that any local representation of B n (i.e., coming from a braided vector space) can be extended to NB n , in contrast to the situation with LB n . We also discuss some directions for future study from categorical and physical perspectives.

published proceedings

  • COMMUNICATIONS IN MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS

altmetric score

  • 2.75

author list (cited authors)

  • Bullivant, A., Kimball, A., Martin, P., & Rowell, E. C.

citation count

  • 6

complete list of authors

  • Bullivant, Alex||Kimball, Andrew||Martin, Paul||Rowell, Eric C

publication date

  • April 2020