Powers of half-twists and congruence subgroups of braid groups
Group Theory
2025-11-12 v1 Geometric Topology
Abstract
In this work, we study the relationship between congruence subgroups and the normal closure of , where is the classical generator of . We characterize the conditions under which has finite index in and provide explicit generators for these finite quotients. For the cases where the index is infinite, we show that contains a free subgroup. Additionally, we compute the Abelianisation of Coxeter braid subgroups in the finite index cases and construct new finite quotients using commutators of congruence subgroups.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2511.08472,
title = {Powers of half-twists and congruence subgroups of braid groups},
author = {Paolo Bellingeri and Celeste Damiani and Oscar Ocampo and Charalampos Stylianakis},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.08472},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
10 pages. Comments are welcome. To be published in AMS Contemporary Mathematics