Topology Seminar: Pierre Guillot (Strasbourg/PIMS)

I am going to explain how representations of the braid groups endowed with a compatible symplectic form give rise to link invariants with values in the Witt ring of the field considered. The construction makes use of Maslov indices. In the end, using the Burau representation, we get one invariant which "contains" many others: signatures, Jones metaplectic invariants, and a polynomial which is almost the one by Alexander-Conway.