Related papers: On fundamental groups related to degeneratable sur…

This article is a revised version of the talk I gave at the conference ``Beauville Surfaces and groups'' held in Newcastle in June 2012. It presents some group theoretical methods to give bounds on the number of connected components of the…

Let $\mathcal S\to\mathbb A^1$ be a smooth family of surfaces whose general fibre is a smooth surface of $\mathbb P^3$ and whose special fibre has two smooth components, intersecting transversally along a smooth curve $R$. We consider the…

In 1981 J. Wahl described smoothings of surface quotient singularities with no vanishing cycles. Given a smoothing of a projective surface X of this type, we construct an associated exceptional vector bundle on the nearby fiber Y in the…

We give infinite series of groups Gamma and of compact complex surfaces of general type S with fundamental group Gamma such that 1) Any surface S' with the same Euler number as S, and fundamental group Gamma, is diffeomorphic to S. 2) The…

We investigate the problem of existence of degenerations of surfaces in $\mathbb P^3$ with ordinary singularities into plane arrangements in general position.

We prove a conjecture of Maulik, Pandharipande, and Thomas expressing the Gromov--Witten invariants of K3 surfaces for divisibility two curve classes in all genus in terms of weakly holomorphic quasimodular forms of level two. Then, we…

Groups associated to surfaces isogenous to a higher product of curves can be characterised by a purely group-theoretic condition, which is the existence of a so-called ramification structure. In this paper, we prove that infinitely many…

Let $X$ be a compact Riemann surface of genus $g$ and let $x \in X$. We derive the classical presentation of $\pi_1(X,x)$ (i.e the one given by $2g$ generators $a_1,b_1, \dots, a_g,b_g$ and the relation $\prod_{i=1}^g[a_i,b_i] = 1$) from…

Since the Teichm\"uller space of a surface $R$ is a deformation space of complex structures defined on $R$, its Bers boundary describes the degeneration of complex structures in a certain sense. In this paper, constructing a concrete…

We study properly embedded and immersed p(pseudohermitian)-minimal surfaces in the 3-dimensional Heisenberg group. From the recent work of Cheng, Hwang, Malchiodi, and Yang, we learn that such surfaces must be ruled surfaces. There are two…

This is an investigation into a classification of embeddings of a surface in Euclidean $3$-space. Specifically, we consider $\mathbb{R}^3$ as having the product structure $\mathbb{R}^2 \times \mathbb{R}$ and let $\pi:\mathbb{R}^2 \times…

We consider the subspace of the homology of a covering space spanned by lifts of simple closed curves. Our main result is the existence of unbranched covers of surfaces where this is a proper subspace. More generally, for a fixed finite…

This paper is the second part of a two-part study of an elementary functorial construction of tesselated surfaces from finite groups. This elementary construction was discussed in the first part and generally results in a large collection…

We show that the isolated invariant branches globalize to algebraic curves, when we consider weak toric type complex hyperbolic foliations on projective toric ambient surfaces. To do it, we pass through a characterization of weak toric type…

A product-quotient surface is the minimal resolution of the singularities of the quotient of a product of two curves by the action of a finite group acting separately on the two factors. We classify all minimal product-quotient surfaces of…

We generalise a result of Garofalo and Pauls: a horizontally minimal smooth surface embedded in the Heisenberg group is locally a (straight) ruled surface, i.e. it consists of straight lines tangent to a horizontal vector field along a…

A recent construction of Hacking relates the classification of stable vector bundles on a surface of general type with $p_g = 0$ and the boundary of the moduli space of deformations of the surface. In the present paper we analyze this…

In this paper we are interested in defining affine structures on discrete quadrangular surfaces of the affine three-space. We introduce, in a constructive way, two classes of such surfaces, called respectively indefinite and definite…

In this paper we explore conditions for a curve in a smooth projective surface to have a free product of cyclic groups as the fundamental group of its complement. It is known that if the surface is $\mathbb P^2$, then such curves must be of…

In this paper we construct new derived invariants with integral coefficients using the theory of motifs, and give several applications. Specifically, we obtain the following results: For complex algebraic surfaces, we prove that certain…