Margalit and Schleimer observed that Dehn twists on orientable surfaces have nontrivial roots. We investigate the problem of roots of a Dehn twist t_c about a nonseparating circle c in the mapping class group M(N_g) of a nonorientable surface N_g of genus g. We explore the existence of roots and, following the work of McCullough, Rajeevsarathy and Monden, give a simple arithmetic description of their conjugacy classes. We also study roots of maximal degree and prove that if we fix an odd integer n>1, then for each sufficiently large g, t_c has a root of degree n in M(N_g). Moreover, for any possible degree n we provide explicit expressions for a particular type of roots of Dehn twists about nonseparating circles in N_g.
We prove that the mapping class group $\mathcal{M}(N_g)$ of a closed nonorientable surface of genus $g$ different than 4 is generated by three torsion elements. Moreover, for every even integer $k\ge 12$ and $g$ of the form $g=pk+2q(k-1)$ or $g=pk+2q(k-1)+1$, where $p,q$ are non-negative integers and $p$ is odd, $\mathcal{M}(N_g)$ is generated by three conjugate elements of order $k$. Analogous results are proved for the subgroup of $\mathcal{M}(N_g)$ generated by Dehn twists.
We investigate the nonorientable 4-genus $γ_4$ of a special family of 2-bridge knots, the twist knots and double twist knots $C(m,n)$. Because the nonorientable 4-genus is bounded by the nonorientable 3-genus, it is known that $γ_4(C(m,n)) \le 3$. By using explicit constructions to obtain upper bounds on $γ_4$ and known obstructions derived from Donaldson's diagonalization theorem to obtain lower bounds on $γ_4$, we produce infinite subfamilies of $C(m,n)$ where $γ_4=0,1,2,$ and $3$, respectively. However, there remain infinitely many double twist knots where our work only shows that $γ_4$ lie…
The level $2$ mapping class group of an orientable closed surface can be generated by squares of Dehn twists about non-separating curves. On the other hand, the level $2$ mapping class group $\mathcal{M}_2(N_g)$ of a non-orientable closed surface $N_g$ can not be generated by only Dehn twists, and so it can not be generated by squares of Dehn twists about non-separating curves. In this paper, we prove that the Dehn twist subgroup of $\mathcal{M}_2(N_g)$ can not be generated by squares of Dehn twists about non-separating curves either. As an application, we give a finite generating set for the …
The aim of this paper is to survey some known results about mapping class group quotients by powers of Dehn twists, related to their finite dimensional representations and to state some open questions. One can construct finite quotients of them, out of representations with Zariski dense images into semisimple Lie groups. We show that, in genus 2, the Fibonacci TQFT representation is actually a specialization of the Jones representation. Eventually, we explain a method of Long and Moody which provides large families of mapping class group representations.
Let $\text{Mod}(S_g)$ be the mapping class group of the closed orientable surface $S_g$ of genus $g \geq 1$. In this paper, we develop various methods for factoring periodic mapping classes into Dehn twists, up to conjugacy. As applications, we develop methods for factoring certain roots of Dehn twists as words in Dehn twists. We will also show the existence of conjugates of periodic maps of order $4g$ and $4g+2$, for $g\geq 2$, whose product is pseudo-Anosov.
In this note, we establish a relationship between fractional Dehn twist coefficients of Riemann surface automorphisms and modular invariants of holomorphic families of algebraic curves. Specially, we give a characterization of pseudo-periodic maps with nontrivial fractional Dehn twist coefficients. We also obtain some uniform lower bounds of non-zero fractional Dehn twist coefficients.
Let f be a Z/2Z-spin structureon a closed surface S of genus g>3. We determine a generating set of the stabilizer of f in the mapping class group of S consisting of Dehn twists about an explicit collection of 2g+1 curves in S. If g=3 then we also determine a generating set of the stabilizer of an odd Z/2Z-spin structure consisting of Dehn twists about a collection of 6 curves.
We examine open books with powers of fibered Dehn twists as monodromy. The resulting contact manifolds can be thought of as Boothby-Wang orbibundles over symplectic orbifolds. Using the mean Euler characteristic of equivariant symplectic homology we can distinguish these contact manifolds and hence show that some fibered Dehn twists are not symplectically isotopic to the identity relative to the boundary. This complements results of Biran and Giroux.
