Representations of braid groups via conjugation actions on congruence subgroups

Kevin P. Knudson

Published 2004-01-06, updated 2004-01-14Version 2

We construct two families of representations of the braid group $B_n$ by considering conjugation actions on congruence subgroups of $GL_{n-1}(Z[t^{\pm 1},q^{\pm 1}])$. We show that many of these representations are faithful modulo the center of $B_n$.