## Tuesday Seminar on Topology

Date, time & place Tuesday 17:00 - 18:30 056Room #056 (Graduate School of Math. Sci. Bldg.) KOHNO Toshitake, KAWAZUMI Nariya, KITAYAMA Takahiro, SAKASAI Takuya Tea: 16:30 - 17:00 Common Room

### 2011/11/22

16:30-18:00   Room #056 (Graduate School of Math. Sci. Bldg.)
Toshitake Kohno (The University of Tokyo)
Quantum and homological representations of braid groups (JAPANESE)
[ Abstract ]
Homological representations of braid groups are defined as
the action of homeomorphisms of a punctured disk on
the homology of an abelian covering of its configuration space.
These representations were extensively studied by Lawrence,
Krammer and Bigelow. In this talk we show that specializations
of the homological representations of braid groups
are equivalent to the monodromy of the KZ equation with
values in the space of null vectors in the tensor product
of Verma modules when the parameters are generic.
To prove this we use representations of the solutions of the
KZ equation by hypergeometric integrals due to Schechtman,
Varchenko and others.

In the case of special parameters these representations
are extended to quantum representations of mapping
class groups. We describe the images of such representations
and show that the images of any Johnson subgroups
contain non-abelian free groups if the genus and the
level are sufficiently large. The last part is a joint
work with Louis Funar.