On the TQFT representations of the mapping class groups (Q1305092)

A Topological Quantum Field Theory gives rise to a tower of representations of the mapping class groups in all genera \(g\). This tower determines the TQFT up to a choice of the vacuum vector. In the abelian case, the representation is given by the monodromy of a system of theta functions. Some cases are explicitly computed in the non-abelian case, and they seem to indicate that the image of the mapping class groups would be finite. This finiteness question is related to a similar question in the context of the associated Conformal Field Theories in dimension 2. The main result of this paper is to show that the image of the mapping class groups under the representation arising from the \(SU(2)\)-TQFT and \(SO(3)\)-TQFT is infinite, for genus \(g\geq 2\) and level \(r\neq 2,3,4,6\), and also \(r\neq 10\) in the case \(g=2\). The author proves the result both in the case of the TQFT constructed using the Kauffman bracket (Blanchet, Habegger, Masbaum, Vogel), and also in the case of the TQFT constructed using the colored Jones polynomial (Reshetikhin, Turaev). As a corollary, it follows that the quotient group of the mapping class group by the normalizer of the \(r\)-th power of a Dehn twist is infinite for genus \(g\geq 3\) and \(r\neq 2,3,4,6,8,12\).