Related papers: From braid groups to mapping class groups

This article is an exposition of certain connections between the braid groups, classical homotopy groups of the 2-sphere, as well as Lie algebras attached to the descending central series of pure braid groups arising as Vassiliev invariants…

Let $\H_g$ be a genus $g$ handlebody and $\MCG_{2n}(\T_g)$ be the $2n$-punctured mapping class group of $\T_g=\partial\H_g$. In this paper we study two particular subgroups of $\MCG_{2n}(\T_g)$ which generalize Hilden groups. As well as…

We show that many normal subgroups of the braid group modulo its centre, and of the mapping class group of a sphere with marked points, have the property that their automorphism and abstract commensurator groups are mapping class groups of…

Usually bundle gerbes are considered as objects of a 2-groupoid, whose 1-morphisms, called stable isomorphisms, are all invertible. I introduce new 1-morphisms which include stable isomorphisms, trivializations and bundle gerbe modules.…

If G is a finite graph and n is a natural number, then the n-strand braid group of G is the fundamental group of the configuration space of n points on G. This article gives a complete computation of the integral cohomology rings of the…

We apply our earlier work on the higher-dimensional analogue of the Mumford conjecture to two questions. Inspired by work of Ebert we prove non-triviality of certain characteristic classes of bundles of smooth closed manifolds. Inspired by…

We study geometric properties of characteristic classes of surfaces bundles. In particular, we show that oriented surface bundles over bases with amenable fundamental groups and dimension at least 2 have trivial simplicial volume. We show…

In this paper, we briefly review some of the known results concerning the cohomological structures of the mapping class group of surfaces, the outer automorphism group of free groups, the diffeomorphism group of surfaces as well as various…

We prove that the homology of the mapping class groups of non-orientable surfaces stabilizes with the genus of the surface. Combining our result with recent work of Madsen and Weiss, we obtain that the classifying space of the stable…

A planar pure braid consists of $n$ descending smooth arcs, each connecting a point on one horizontal line $\ell_{1}$ to a point on a horizontal line $\ell_{2}$, which is required to be directly below the first point. Two arcs are allowed…

We classify compact Riemann surfaces of genus $g$, where $g-1$ is a prime $p$, which have a group of automorphisms of order $\rho(g-1)$ for some integer $\rho\ge 1$, and determine isogeny decompositions of the corresponding Jacobian…

Let $M$ be the disk or a compact, connected surface without boundary different from the sphere $S^2$ and the real projective plane $\mathbb{R}P^2$, and let $N$ be a compact, connected surface (possibly with boundary). It is known that the…

Let $S$ and $S'$ be orientable finite-type surfaces of genus $g\geq 4$ and $g'$, respectively. We prove that every multitwist-preserving map between pure mapping class groups $\text{PMap}(S)\to \text{PMap}(S')$ is induced by a…

We take the fundamental group of the complement of the branch curve of a generic projection induced from canonical embedding of a surface. This group is stable on connected components of moduli spaces of surfaces. Since for many classes of…

The braid groups B_n can be defined as the mapping class group of the n-punctured disc. The Lawrence-Krammer representation of the braid group B_n is the induced action on a certain twisted second homology of the space of unordered pairs of…

The Hopf theorem states that homotopy classes of continuous maps from a closed connected oriented smooth $n$-manifold $M$ to the $n$-sphere are classified by their degree. Such a map is equivalent to a section of the trivial $n$-sphere…

We classify rotary (orientably-regular) maps whose underlying graphs are multicycles. For the multicycle $\mathrm{C}_n^{(\lambda)}$ of length $n$ and edge-multiplicity $\lambda$, we determine all rotary embeddings for $n\geqslant 3$ and…

This paper will appear in the Santa Cruz proceedings. An overview of the braid group techniques in the theory of algebraic surfaces, from Zariski to the latest results, is presented. An outline of the Van Kampen algorithm for computing…

In this survey paper, we give a complete list of known results on the first and the second homology groups of surface mapping class groups. Some known results on higher (co)homology are also mentioned.

Homological stability for sequences of groups is often proved by studying the spectral sequence associated to the action of a typical group in the sequence on a highly-connected simplicial complex whose stabilizers are related to previous…