Homological and monodromy representations of framed braid groups

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce two new classes of representations of the framed braid groups. One is the homological representation constructed as the action of a mapping class group on a certain homology group. The other is the monodromy representation of the confluent KZ equation, which is a generalization of the KZ equation to have irregular singularities. We also give a conjectural equivalence between these two classes of representations.