Secondary Braid Groups

Abstract

We generalize presentations of the fundamental group of discriminant complements and arrive at a class of presentations associated naturally with words in the free monoid of the alphabet $\sigma_1,\dots,\sigma_{n-1}$. Our study addresses invariance properties of these presentations and the presented groups under various operations on the words. In particular we prove that the group does only depend on the corresponding element in the positive braid monoid, and under mild hypotheses only on its conjugacy class in the braid group.