Related papers: Lefschetz pencils on a complex projective plane fr…

We prove that there exists no a priori bound on the Euler characteristic of a closed symplectic 4-manifold coming solely from the genus of a compatible Lefschetz pencil on it, nor is there a similar bound for Stein fillings of a contact…

Kodaira's classification of singular fibers in elliptic fibrations and its translation into the language of monodromies and Lefschetz fibrations has been a boon to the study of 4-manifolds. In this article, we begin the work of translating…

Auroux, Donaldson and Katzarkov introduced broken Lefschetz fibrations as a generalization of Lefshcetz fibrations in order to describe near-symplectic 4-manifolds. We first study monodromy representations of higher sides of genus-1…

The complete classification of (3,3)-nets and of (3,4)-nets with only double and triple points is given. Up to lattice isomorphism, there are exactly 3 effective possibilities in each case, and some of these provide new examples of…

In this article, we construct countably many mutually non-isotopic diffeomorphisms of some closed non simply-connected 4-manifolds that are homotopic to but not isotopic to the identity, by surgery along $\Theta$-graphs. As corollaries of…

We develop techniques to construct explicit symplectic Lefschetz fibrations over the 2-sphere with any prescribed signature and any spin type when the signature is divisible by 16. This solves a long-standing conjecture on the existence of…

The sextic plane curves that are invariant under the standard action of the icosahedral group on the projective plane make up a pencil of genus ten curves (spanned by a sum of six lines and a three times a conic). This pencil was first…

The Wiman-Edge pencil is a pencil of genus $6$ curves for which the generic member has automorphism group the alternating group $\mathfrak{A}_5$. There is a unique smooth member, the Wiman sextic, with automorphism group the symmetric group…

This article presents the constructions of new infinite families of smooth 4-manifolds with the property that any two manifolds in the same family are homeomorphic and, from their construction, seem to be quite different, but cannot be…

Chart descriptions are a graphic method to describe monodromy representations of various topological objects. Here we introduce a chart description for genus-two Lefschetz fibrations, and show that any genus-two Lefschetz fibration can be…

We prove upper bounds for the number of critical points in semistable symplectic Lefschetz fibrations. We also obtain a new lower bound for the number of nonseparting vanishing cycles in Lefschetz pencils, and reprove the known lower bounds…

We use Noether-Lefschetz theory to study the reduced Gromov--Witten invariants of a holomorphic-symplectic variety of $K3^{[n]}$-type. This yields strong evidence for a new conjectural formula that expresses Gromov-Witten invariants of this…

In this article we construct a family of genus two Lefschetz fibrations $f_{n}: X_{\theta_n} \rightarrow \mathbb{S}^{2}$ with $e(X_{\theta_n})=11$, $b^{+}_{2}(X_{\theta_n})=1$, and $c_1^{2}(X_{\theta_n})=1$ by applying a single lantern…

This article introduces a finite piecewise Euclidean cell complex homeomorphic to the space of monic centered complex polynomials of degree $d$ whose critical values lie in a fixed closed rectangular region. We call this the branched…

We define a new 4-dimensional symplectic cut and paste operations arising from the generalized star relations $(t_{a_0}t_{a_1}t_{a_2} \cdots t_{a_{2g+1}})^{2g+1} = t_{b_1} t_{b_2}^{g}t_{b_3}$, also known as the trident relations, in the…

The program of understanding Shape Theory layer by layer topologically and geometrically -- proposed in Part I -- is now addressed for 4 points in 1-$d$. Topological shape space graphs are far more complex here, whereas metric shape spaces…

We construct a family of elliptic surfaces with $p_g=q=1$ that arise from base change of the Hesse pencil. We identify explicitly a component of the higher Noether-Lefschetz locus with positive Mordell-Weil rank, and a particular surface…

Let $S$ be a complex projective surface. Lefschetz originally proved Lefschetz $(1, 1)$--Theorem by studying a Lefschetz pencil of hyperplane sections of $S$ and the Abel--Jacobi mapping. In this paper, we attack Lefschetz $(1, 1)$--Theorem…

We construct a rational homotopy-theoretic model for a classifying space of locally conformally symplectic structures on four-manifolds, and use it to definition a cobordism category of three-manifolds `anchored' by principal $\Omega^2 S^2$…

In this paper we compute the motivic Chern classes and homology Hirzebruch characteristic classes of (possibly singular) toric varieties, which in the complete case fit nicely with a generalized Hirzebruch-Riemann-Roch theorem. As special…