On injective homomorphisms for pure braid groups, and associated Lie algebras

Abstract The purpose of this article is to record the center of the Lie algebra obtained from the descending central series of Artin's pure braid group, a Lie algebra analyzed in work of Kohno [T. Kohno, Linear representations of braid groups and classical Yang–Baxter equations, in: Contemp. Math., vol. 78, 1988, pp. 339–363; T. Kohno, Vassiliev invariants and the de Rham complex on the space of knots, in: Symplectic Geometry and Quantization, in: Contemp. Math., vol. 179, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 1994, pp. 123–138; T. Kohno, Serie de Poincare–Koszul associee aux groupes de tresses pures, Invent. Math. 82 (1985) 57–75], and Falk and Randell [M. Falk, R. Randell, The lower central series of a fiber-type arrangement, Invent. Math. 82 (1985) 77–88]. The structure of this center gives a Lie algebraic criterion for testing whether a homomorphism out of the classical pure braid group is faithful which is analogous to a criterion used to test whether certain morphisms out of free groups are faithful [F.R. Cohen, J. Wu, On braid groups, free groups, and the loop space of the 2-sphere, in: Algebraic Topology: Categorical Decomposition Techniques, in: Progr. Math., vol. 215, Birkhauser, Basel, 2003; Braid groups, free groups, and the loop space of the 2-sphere, math.AT/0409307 ]. However, it is as unclear whether this criterion for faithfulness can be applied to any open cases concerning representations of P n such as the Gassner representation.