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

We introduce the $2$-nodal spherical deformation of certain singular fibers of genus $2$ fibrations, and use such deformations to construct various examples of simply connected minimal symplectic $4$-manifolds with small topology. More…

We show that any 4-manifold, after surgery on a curve, admits an achiral Lefschetz fibration. In particular, we show that the connected sum of any simply connected 4-manifold with a 2-sphere bundle over the 2-sphere will admit an achiral…

Using the existence of certain symplectic submanifolds in symplectic 4-manifolds, we prove an estimate from above for the number of singular fibers with separating vanishing cycles in minimal Lefschetz fibrations over surfaces of positive…

We show that the combinatorial Lefschetz number is a topological invariant. This is an important result in itself; in order to point it out, we will also work here several relevant consequences in different directions. The first of them is…

In a previous paper, we classified and constructed all rational plane curves of type (d,d-2). In this paper, we generalize these results to irreducible plane curves of type (d,d-2) with positive genus.

The weak and strong Lefschetz properties are two basic properties that Artinian algebras may have. Both Lefschetz properties may vary under small perturbations or changes of the characteristic. We study these subtleties by proposing a…

In this article, we generalize the classification of genus one Lefschetz fibrations to genus one simplified broken Lefschetz fibrations, which have fibers of genera one and zero. We classify genus one Lefschetz fibrations over the 2-disk…

We present existence results for certain singular 2-dimensional foliations on 4-manifolds. The singularities can be chosen to be simple, e.g. the same as those that appear in Lefschetz pencils. There seems to be a wealth of such creatures…

We show that hyperelliptic symplectic Lefschetz fibrations are symplectically birational to two-fold covers of rational ruled surfaces, branched in a symplectically embedded surface. This reduces the classification of genus 2 fibrations to…

We show that isotopy classes of simple closed curves in any oriented surface admit a quandle structure with operations induced by Dehn twists, the Dehn quandle of the surface. We further show that the monodromy of a Lefschetz fibration can…

We prove that the monodromy group of the inflection points of plane curves of degree $d$ is the symmetric group $\mathbb S_{3d(d-2)}$ for $d\geq 4$ and in the case $d=3$ this group is the group of the projective transformations of $\mathbb…

We prove the irreducibility of the space parametrizing branched covers of a fixed Riemann surface $B$ of degree $d$, with at least 2d branch points, and with monodromy group equal to $S_d$. The result is classical for $g(B)=0$. The result…

We construct some infinite series of free and nearly free curves using pencils of conics with a base locus of cardinality at most two. These curves have an interesting topology, e.g. a high degree Alexander polynomial that can be explicitly…

In this paper we study the behaviour of the Lefschetz property under the blow-up construction. We show that it is possible to reduce the dimension of the kernel of the Lefschetz map if we blow up along a suitable submanifold satisfying the…

Let six points $1, ...6$ lie in general position in the real projective plane and consider the pencil of nodal cubics based at these points, with node at one of them, say 1. This pencil has five reducible cubics. We call combinatorial cubic…

We characterize the monodromies of projective structures with fuchsian-type singularities. Namely, any representation from the fundamental group of a Riemann surface of finite-type in $PSL_2(\mathbb{C})$ can be represented as the holonomy…

The pencil of Kuribayashi-Komiya quartics $$ x^4 + y^4 + z^4 + t(x^2y^2 + x^2z^2 + y^2z^2)=0 \, \mbox{ where } t \in \bar{\mathbb{C}} $$is a complex one-dimensional family of Riemann surfaces of genus three endowed with a group of…

We prove the minimality of the CW-complex structure for complements of hyperplane arrangements in $\mathbb C^n$ by using the theory of Lefschetz pencils and results on the variation maps within a pencil of hyperplanes. This also provides a…

By a result of Kedra and Pinsonnault, we know that the topology of groups of symplectomorphisms of symplectic 4-manifolds is complicated in general. However, in all known (very specific) examples, the rational cohomology rings of…

We introduce the concept of s-formal minimal model as an extension of formality. We prove that any orientable compact manifold M, of dimension 2n or (2n-1), is formal if and only if M is (n-1)-formal. The formality and the hard Lefschetz…