Representations of Braid Groups and Generalisations

Abstract

We define and study extensions of Artin's representation and braid monodromy representation to the case of topological and algebraical generalisations of braid groups. In particular we provide faithful representations of braid groups of oriented surfaces with boundary components as (outer) automorphisms of free groups. We give also similar representations for braid groups of non oriented surfaces with boundary components and we show a representation of braid groups of closed surfaces as outer automorphisms of free groups. Finally, we provide faithful representations of Artin-Tits groups of type $\mathcal{D}$ as automorphisms of free groups.Comment: Few misprints corrected, simpler proof for proposition 1