Minimal generating sets and the abelianization for the quasitoric braid group

A toric braid is a braid whose closure is a torus link in [Formula: see text]. Manturov [A combinatorial representation of links by quasitoric braids, European J. Combin. 23(2) (2002) 207–212] generalized toric braids that is called quasitoric braids and showed that the subset of quasitoric braids in the classical braid group is a subgroup of the braid group. We call this subgroup the quasitoric braid group. In this paper, we give two minimal generating sets for the quasitoric braid group and determine its abelianization. The minimalities of these two generating sets are obtained from a lower bound by the number of generators for the abelianization.