Representations of the necklace braid group: topological and combinatorial approaches (Q2174648)

The necklace braid group (of rank \(n\)) is the motion group of the \(n\)-necklace which consists of \(n\) pairwise unlinked circles each linked to an auxiliary circle. Alternatively, the necklace group can be seen as an extension of the braid group by one extra generator (in the sense that it contains the braid group, and the quotient is generated by one element), namely, that corresponds to rotating the auxilary circle in the necklace. By the latter description, given a braid group representation, one can try to extend it to a representation of the necklace braid group by finding an appropriate action of the extra generator. Constructed in the paper are so-called standard extensions, which exist for all irreducible braid group representations. The paper then discusses standard and non-standard extensions of various braid group representaions: the standard representation; the Burau representation; the Lawrence-Krammer-Bigelow representation; and some local representations, e.g., the representations coming from a braided fusion category, as well as a physics aspect of certain standard extensions. The paper also describes a relation (a group morphism) between the necklace braid group and the loop braid group and compares some of the above results with the case for the loop braid group.