arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to D. Jeremy Copeland.
In this paper, we study the monodromy of the Hitchin fibration for rank 2 vector bundles over hyperelliptic curves. We reduce the problem to studying a surface braid group generalization of the classical Burau representation, and give a combinatorial method for computing this representation.
Herein we prove that if $M$ is a compact oriented Riemann surface of genus $g$, and $M^{[n]}$ is the classifying space of $n$ distinct, unordered points on $M$, then the kernel of the map $π_1(M^{[n]})\to H_1(M)$ is generated by transpositions for sufficiently large $n$. Specifically, we treat $M$ as a polyhedron, and the edge set of $M$ generates this group.