Low-dimensional representations of the three component loop braid group
Motivated by physical and topological applications, we study representations of the group LB 3 of motions of 3 unlinked oriented circles in R 3 . Our point of view is to regard the three strand braid group B 3 as a subgroup of LB 3 and study the problem of extending B 3 representations. We introduce the notion of a standard extension and characterize B 3 representations admitting such an extension. In particular we show, using a classification result of Tuba and Wenzl [Pacific J. Math. 197, 491–510 (2001)], that every irreducible B 3 representation of dimension at most 5 has a (standard) extension. We show that this result is sharp by exhibiting an irreducible 6-dimensional B 3 representation that has no extensions (standard or otherwise). Here, we obtain complete classifications of (1) irreducible 2-dimensional LB 3 representations, (2) extensions of irreducible 3-dimensional B 3 representations, and (3) irreducible LB 3 representations whose restriction to B 3 has abelian image.