The Burau estimate for the entropy of a braid

Band, Gavin; Boyland, Philip

doi:10.2140/agt.2007.7.1345

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The Burau estimate for the entropy of a braid

Gavin Band and Philip Boyland

Algebraic & Geometric Topology 7 (2007) 1345–1378

DOI: 10.2140/agt.2007.7.1345

arXiv: arxiv:math.DS/0612716

Abstract

The topological entropy of a braid is the infimum of the entropies of all homeomorphisms of the disk which have a finite invariant set represented by the braid. When the isotopy class represented by the braid is pseudo-Anosov or is reducible with a pseudo-Anosov component, this entropy is positive. Fried and Kolev proved that the entropy is bounded below by the logarithm of the spectral radius of the braid’s Burau matrix, $B (t)$ , after substituting a complex number of modulus $1$ in place of $t$ . In this paper we show that for a pseudo-Anosov braid the estimate is sharp for the substitution of a root of unity if and only if it is sharp for $t = - 1$ . Further, this happens if and only if the invariant foliations of the pseudo-Anosov map have odd order singularities at the strings of the braid and all interior singularities have even order. An analogous theorem for reducible braids is also proved.

Keywords

Dynamical systems, Braid group, Burau representation

Mathematical Subject Classification 2000

Primary: 37E30

Secondary: 37B40, 20F36, 20F29

References

Publication

Received: 2 January 2007

Accepted: 3 September 2007

Published: 24 September 2007

Authors

Gavin Band
Dept. of Mathematics University of Liverpool Liverpool L69 7ZL UK
http://www.gavinband.info/
Philip Boyland
Dept. of Mathematics University of Florida Gainesville FL 32605-8105 USA
http://www.math.ufl.edu/~boyland/

Volume 7, issue 3 (2007)