English

Almost all strongly quasipositive braid closures are fibered

Geometric Topology 2016-11-01 v1

Abstract

We use the Birman-Ko-Lee presentation of the braid group to show that all closures of strongly quasipositive braids whose normal form contains a positive power of the dual Garside element δ\delta are fibered. We classify links which admit such a braid representative in geometric terms as boundaries of plumbings of positive Hopf bands to a disk. Rudolph constructed fibered strongly quasipositive links as closures of positive words on certain generating sets of BnB_n and we prove that Rudolph's condition is equivalent to ours. Finally, we show that the braid index is a strict upper bound for the number of crossing changes required to fiber a strongly quasipositive braid.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1610.09664,
  title  = {Almost all strongly quasipositive braid closures are fibered},
  author = {Ian Banfield},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.09664},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

14 pages, 11 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T16:36:45.866Z