Journal of the London Mathematical Society Advance Access originally published online on October 17, 2007
Journal of the London Mathematical Society 2007 76(2):451-466; doi:10.1112/jlms/jdm077
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© 2007 London Mathematical Society
The mapping class group action on the homology of the configuration spaces of surfaces
The Graduate School of Mathematical Sciences
The University of Tokyo
Komaba Meguro-ku
Tokyo 153
Japan
In this paper, we study the natural action of the mapping class group
g, 1 on the (co)homology groups of the configuration spaces of n-points on a surface
of genus g with the boundary 
S1. We present two main results in this paper. The first result is that the kernel of the action of
g, 1 coincides with the kernel of the natural action on the nth lower central quotient group of the fundamental group of
. The second result is a new interpretation of the cohomology group H*(
g, 1; T[H1]) of
g, 1 with coefficients in the free tensor algebra T[H1] over
generated by the first homology group H1 of
, by using the configuration spaces. More precisely, we define a certain cochain complex C of
g, 1-modules by using the configuration spaces and prove that H*(
g, 1; C) is canonically isomorphic to H*(
g, 1; T[H1]).
2000 Mathematics Subject Classification 55R80 (primary). 57M05, 20F28 (secondary).
Received October 18, 2006; revised April 3, 2007; published online October 17, 2007.