Lower central and derived series of semi-direct products, and applications to surface braid groups

Abstract

For an arbitrary semi-direct product, we give a general description of its lower central series and an estimation of its derived series. In the second part of the paper, we study these series for the full braid group Bn(M) and pure braid group Pn(M) of a compact surface M, orientable or non-orientable, the aim being to determine the values of n for which Bn(M) and Pn(M) are residually nilpotent or residually soluble. We first solve this problem in the case where M is the 2-torus. We then use the results of the first part of the paper to calculate explicitly the lower central series of Pn(K), where K is the Klein bottle. Finally, if M is a non-orientable, compact surface without boundary, we determine the values of n for which Bn(M) is residually nilpotent or residually soluble in the cases that were not already known in the literature.