Abstracts Category : Other

Crystallographic Complex Reflection Groups and the Braid Conjecture

by Philip C Puente

Crystallographic complex reflection groups are generated by reflections about affine hyperplanes in complex space and stabilize a full rank lattice. These analogs of affine Weyl groups have infinite order and were classified by V.L. Popov in 1982. The classical Braid theorem (first established by E. Artin and E. Brieskorn) asserts that the Artin group of a reflection group (finite or affine Weyl) gives the fundamental group of regular orbits. In other words, the fundamental group of the space with reflecting hyperplanes removed has a presentation mimicking that of the Coxeter presentation; one need only remove relations giving generators finite order. N.V Dung used a semi-cell construction to prove the Braid theorem for affine Weyl groups. Malle conjectured that the Braid theorem holds for all crystallographic complex reflection groups after constructing Coxeter-like reflection presentations. We show how to extend Dung's ideas to crystallographic complex reflection groups and then extend the Braid theorem to some groups in the infinite family [G(r,p,n)]. The proof requires a new classification of crystallographic groups in the infinite family that fail the Steinberg theorem.Advisors/Committee Members: Shepler, Anne, Brozovic, Douglass, Douglass, Matthew.