Related papers: On fundamental groups related to degeneratable sur…

Given a projective surface and a generic projection to the plane, the braid monodromy factorization (and thus, the braid monodromy type) of the complement of its branch curve is one of the most important topological invariants, stable on…

We take the fundamental group of the complement of the branch curve of a generic projection induced from canonical embedding of a surface. This group is stable on connected components of moduli spaces of surfaces. Since for many classes of…

The paper contains a general construction which produces new examples of non simply-connected smooth projective surfaces. We analyze the resulting surfaces and their fundamental groups. Many of these fundamental groups are expected to be…

This paper surveys and gives a uniform exposition of results contained in papers published by the team of authors. The subject is degenerations of surfaces, especially to unions of planes. More specifically, we deduce some properties of the…

We give a topological interpretation of the core group invariant of a surface embedded in S^4. We show that the group is isomorphic to the free product of the fundamental group of the double branch cover of S^4 with the surface as a…

In this paper we study some properties of degenerations of surfaces whose general fibre is a smooth projective surface and whose central fibre is a reduced, connected surface $X \subset IP^r$, $r \geq 3$, which is assumed to be a union of…

We present a preliminary investigation of algebraic surfaces that have non-planar degenerations, along with their Galois covers and fundamental groups. Specifically, we investigate the tetrahedron and the double tetrahedron. The resulting…

Let $X$ be a surface of degree $n$, projected onto $\mathbb{CP}^2$. The surface has a natural Galois cover with Galois group $S_n.$ It is possible to determine the fundamental group of a Galois cover from that of the complement of the…

In this paper we consider the Galois covers of algebraic surfaces of degree 6, with all associated planar degenerations. We compute the fundamental groups of those Galois covers, using their degeneration. We show that for 8 types of…

We discuss the applications of fundamental groups (of complements of curves) computations (and possibly the computations of the second homotopy group as a model over it) to the classification of algebraic surface. We prove that the…

This paper will appear in the Santa Cruz proceedings. An overview of the braid group techniques in the theory of algebraic surfaces, from Zariski to the latest results, is presented. An outline of the Van Kampen algorithm for computing…

Globally irreducible nodes (i.e. nodes whose branches belong to the same irreducible component) have mild effects on the most common topological invariants of an algebraic curve. In other words, adding a globally irreducible node (simple…

The main result in this paper is as follows: Let S be the branch curve (in the projective plan) of a generic projection of a Veronese surface. Then the fundamental group of the complement of S is an extension of a solvable group by a…

In this paper we present an example of two polarized K3 surfaces which are not Fundamental Group Equivalent (their fundamental groups of the complement of the branch curves are not isomorphic; denoted by FGE) but the fundamental groups of…

We prove that the complex surfaces parametrizing cuboids and face cuboids, as well as their minimal resolution of singularities, have trivial fundamental group. We then compute the fundamental group of certain open smooth subvarieties of…

The first main purpose of this paper is to contribute to the existing knowledge about the complex projective surfaces $S$ of general type with $p_g(S) = 0$ and their moduli spaces, constructing 19 new families of such surfaces with hitherto…

Let S be an immersed horizontal surface in a 3-dimensional graph manifold. We show that the fundamental group of the surface S is quadratically distorted whenever the surface is virtually embedded (i.e., separable) and is exponentially…

The fundamental group of a smooth projective variety is fibered if it maps onto the fundamental group of smooth curve of genus 2 or more. The goal of this paper is to establish some strong restrictions on these groups, and in particular on…

In this paper, we study non-planar degeneracies with cylindrical configurations. They could be constructed by the product $\mathbb{CP}^1 \times T$ of the projective plane and a complex torus with embedding $(m,n)$. We prove that their…

Introducing the notion of stabilized fundamental group for the complement of a branch curve in $CP^2$, we define effectively computable invariants of symplectic 4-manifolds that generalize those previously introduced by Moishezon and…