Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov bundles are topologically trivial

Abstract

We prove that the vector bundles at the core of the Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov and quantum constructions of braid groups representations are topologically trivial bundles. We provide partial generalizations of this result to generalized braid groups. A crucial intermediate result is that the representation ring of the symmetric group on n letters is generated by the alternating powers of its natural n-dimensional representation.