Smallest noncyclic quotients of braid and mapping class groups

DOI10.2140/GT.2023.27.2479MaRDI QIDQ6142257zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors

Publication date 21 December 2023

Published in Geometry \& Topology (Search for Journal in Brave)

Copyright license Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.02162

zbMATH Keywords

braid groupsmapping class groupssmallest noncyclic quotients

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Braid groups; Artin groups (20F36) Geometric group theory (20F65) 2-dimensional topology (including mapping class groups of surfaces, Teichmüller theory, curve complexes, etc.) (57K20)

Abstract: We show that the smallest non-cyclic quotients of braid groups are symmetric groups, proving a conjecture of Margalit. Moreover we recover results of Artin and Lin about the classification of homomorphisms from braid groups on n strands to symmetric groups on k letters, where k is at most n. Unlike the original proofs, our method does not use the Bertrand-Chebyshev theorem, answering a question of Artin. Similarly for mapping class group of closed orientable surfaces, the smallest non-cyclic quotient is given by the mod two reduction of the symplectic representation. We provide an elementary proof of this result, originally due to Kielak-Pierro, which proves a conjecture of Zimmermann.

Review text

The main results of this paper identify the smallest noncyclic quotients of braid groups and mapping class groups as the obvious candidates. For braid groups, this was conjectured by Margalit (and improves various recent results), and for mapping class groups this reproves (and improves) a result of \textit{D. Kielak} and \textit{E. Pierro} [Groups Geom. Dyn. 14, No. 2, 489--512 (2020; Zbl 1512.57022)] with much simpler methods. To be a bit more precise, the \(n\)-strand braid group has an obvious map to the symmetric group \(S_n\) of order \(n!\) by sending a braid to the induced permutation of endpoints. The first main result (Theorem 1) shows that any non-cyclic quotient of the \(n\)-strand braid group (for \(n=3\) or \(n\geq 5\)) has order at least \(n!\), and the lower bound is only achieved by post-composing the obvious map to the symmetric group \(S_n\) with an automorphism. The mapping class group case (Theorem 4) is similar, with action on mod-\(2\)-homology of the surface taking the place of the symmetric group. For surfaces with punctures and boundary components (Theorem 5) the smaller of the two phenomena happens. The proofs use a clever inductive application of the orbit stabiliser theorem: first conjugate elements \(\rho_i\) of the braid (or mapping class) group are found that are necessarily distinct in non-cyclic quotients (Lemmas 8 and 11). Then, using the orbit stabiliser theorem on the conjugation action, this yields lower bounds on the size of the centraliser of the images of the \(\rho_i\). The centralisers of the \(\rho_i\) in the braid groups are braid groups of lower complexity, then allowing for an inductive argument.

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Cited in

(6)

• Smallest nonabelian quotients of surface braid groups
• Quotients of the braid group that are extensions of the symmetric group
• Minimal presentation, finite quotients and lower central series of cactus groups
• Finiteness of canonical quotients of Dehn quandles of surfaces
• Totally symmetric sets
• Finite quotients of braid groups

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