The Magnus representation and higher-order Alexander invariants for homology cobordisms of surfaces
Abstract
The set of homology cobordisms from a surface to itself with markings of their boundaries has a natural monoid structure. To investigate the structure of this monoid, we define and study its Magnus representation and Reidemeister torsion invariants by generalizing Kirk-Livingston-Wang's argument over the Gassner representation of string links. Moreover, by applying Cochran and Harvey's framework of higher-order (non-commutative) Alexander invariants to them, we extract several pieces of information about the monoid and related objects.
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