Automorphisms of braid groups on orientable surfaces

Abstract

In this paper, we compute the automorphism groups [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] of braid groups [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] on every orientable surface [Formula: see text], which are isomorphic to group extensions of the extended mapping class group [Formula: see text] by the transvection subgroup except for a few cases. We also prove that [Formula: see text] is always a characteristic subgroup of [Formula: see text], unless [Formula: see text] is a twice-punctured sphere and [Formula: see text].