Related papers: Monodromy and vanishing cycles for sufficiently am…
Given an ample line bundle on a toric surface, a question of Donaldson asks which simple closed curves can be vanishing cycles for nodal degenerations of smooth curves in the complete linear system. This paper provides a complete answer.…
We compute the topological monodromy of every family of complete intersection curves. Like in the case of plane curves previously treated by the second-named author, we find the answer is given by the $r$-spin mapping class group associated…
Let f be an isolated plane curve singularity with Milnor fiber of genus at least 5. For all such f, we give (a) an intrinsic description of the geometric monodromy group that does not invoke the notion of the versal deformation space, and…
We resume the study initiated in \cite{CL}. For a generic curve $C$ in an ample linear system $\vert \mathcal{L} \vert$ on a toric surface $X$, a vanishing cycle of $C$ is an isotopy class of simple closed curve that can be contracted to a…
The geometric monodromy of a plane curve singularity is a quasi-finite diffeomorphism. In this paper we locate the reduction curves of the geometric monodromy and the quadratic vanishing cycles of the singularity. An application to the…
For an ample line bundle $\mathcal{L}$ on a complete toric surface $X$, we consider the subset $V_{\mathcal{L}} \subset \vert \mathcal{L} \vert$ of irreducible, nodal, rational curves contained in the smooth locus of $X$. We study the…
We develop recursive formulas for the horizontal and vertical monodromies of a quasi-ordinary surface. These are monodromies associated to the Milnor fiber of a slice transverse to a component of the singular locus. In the course of working…
We consider the space of smooth complex projective plane curves of degree d. Defined over this is the tautological family of plane curves, and hence there is a monodromy representation into the mapping class group of the fiber. We show two…
A linear system on a smooth complex algebraic surface gives rise to a family of smooth curves in the surface. Such a family has a topological monodromy representation valued in the mapping class group of a fiber. Extending arguments of…
We give a survey on some aspects of the topological investigation of isolated singularities of complex hypersurfaces by means of Picard-Lefschetz theory. We focus on the concept of distinguished bases of vanishing cycles and the concept of…
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…
Every compact symplectic 4-manifold can be realized as a branched cover of the complex projective plane branched along a symplectic curve with cusp and node singularities; the covering map is induced by a triple of sections of a "very…
Consider the family of smooth cubic surfaces which can be realized as threefold-branched covers of $\mathbb{P}^{2}$, with branch locus equal to a smooth cubic curve. This family is parametrized by the space $\mathcal{U}_{3}$ of smooth cubic…
We study the monodromy of vanishing cycles for map-germs $f:(C^{2n},0) \to (\CM^k,0)$ whose components are in involution. Although the singular fibres of such maps have non-isolated singularities, it is shown that the regular fibres are…
The logarithmic connections studied in the paper are direct images of regular connections on line bundles over genus-2 double covers of the elliptic curve. We give an explicit parametrization of all such connections, determine their…
We study the vanishing cycles of a one-parameter smoothing of a complex analytic space and show that the weight filtration on its perverse cohomology sheaf of the highest degree is quite close to the monodromy filtration so that its graded…
We employ the perverse vanishing cycles to show that each reduced cohomology group of the Milnor fiber, except the top two, can be computed from the restriction of the vanishing cycle complex to only singular strata with a certain lower…
We show that the image of the pure braid group under the monodromy action on the homology of a cyclic covering of degree d of the projective line is an arithmetic group provided the number of branch points is sufficiently large compared to…
We prove an extended Lefschetz principle for a large class of pencils of hypersurfaces having isolated singularities, possibly in the axis, and show that the module of vanishing cycles is generated by the images of certain variation maps.
We compute the monodromy of the Hitchin fibration for the moduli space of $L$-twisted $SL(n,\mathbb{C})$ and $GL(n,\mathbb{C})$-Higgs bundles for any $n$, on a compact Riemann surface of genus $g>1$. We require the line bundle $L$ to either…