Related papers: Geometric monodromy and the hyperbolic disc

This paper is a survey of the authors' recent results on "abc-surfaces" and the monodromy of their natural Lefschetz fibrations and projections to P^1 x P^1, see (arXiv:0910.2142). The results being surveyed explore various fundamental…

We use slicing by nongeneric pencils of hypersurfaces and prove a new theorem of Lefschetz type for singular non compact spaces, at the homotopy level. As applications, we derive results on the topology of the fibres of polynomial functions…

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…

We present explicit algorithms for simplifying the topology of indefinite fibrations on 4-manifolds, which include broken Lefschetz fibrations and indefinite Morse 2-functions. The algorithms consist of sequences of moves, which modify…

We construct two types of non-holomorphic Lefschetz fibrations over $S^2$ with $(-1)$-sections ---hence, they are fiber sum indecomposable--- by giving the corresponding positive relators. One type of the two does not satisfy the slope…

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…

We prove that every closed oriented smooth 4-manifold X admits a broken Lefschetz fibration (aka singular Lefschetz fibration) over the 2-sphere. Given any closed orientable surface F of square zero in X, we can choose the fibration so that…

Let M be a smooth 4-manifold which admits a genus g Lefschetz fibration over D^2 or S^2. We develop a technique to compute the signature of M using the global monodromy of this fibration.

We introduce hyperelliptic simplified (more generally, directed) broken Lefschetz fibrations, which is a generalization of hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations. We construct involutions on the total spaces of such fibrations of genus $g\geq…

Let M denote the total space of a Lefschetz fibration, obtained by blowing up a Lefschetz pencil on an algebraic surface. We consider the n-fold fibre sum M(n), generalizing the construction of the elliptic surfaces E(n). For a Lefschetz…

For every integer g greater than or equal to 2, there exist infinitely many pairwise nonhomeomorphic smooth 4-manifolds that admit genus-g Lefschetz fibrations over S^2 but do not carry any complex structure with either orientation. This…

Integral symplectic 4-manifolds may be described in terms of Lefschetz fibrations. In this note we give a formula for the signature of any Lefschetz fibration in terms of the second cohomology of the moduli space of stable curves. As a…

We study some asymptotic properties of the sequences of symplectic Lefschetz pencils constructed by Donaldson. In particular we prove that the vanishing spheres of these pencils are, for large degree, conjugated under the action of the…

Monodromy in analytic families of smooth complex surfaces yields groups of isotopy classes of orientation preserving diffeomorphisms for each family member X. For all deformation classes of minimal elliptic surfaces with p_g>q=0, we…

We develop the Lefschetz fixed-point theory for noncompact manifolds of bounded geometry and uniformly continuous maps. Specifically, we define the uniform Lefschetz class $\mathscr{L}(f)$ of a uniformly continuous map $f\colon M\to M$ of a…

We compute the mapping class group-valued monodromy of any sufficiently ample linear system on any smooth simply connected projective surface, identifying this with the r-spin mapping class group associated to a maximal root of the adjoint…

This paper studies the interplay between self-crossing boundary Lefschetz fibrations and generalized complex structures. We show that these fibrations arise from the moment maps in semi-toric geometry and use them to construct self-crossing…

Motivated by the programmes initiated by Taubes and Perutz, we study the geometry of near-symplectic 4-manifolds, i.e., manifolds equipped with a closed 2-form which is symplectic outside a union of embedded 1-dimensional submanifolds, and…

We provide a closed, simply connected, symplectic $6$-manifold having infinitely many codimension $2$ symplectic submanifolds. These are mutually homologous but homotopy inequivalent, and furthermore, they cannot admit complex structures.…

We introduce a new type of singularity for smooth maps from $4$-manifolds to surfaces, called an $M$-singularity, whose critical locus is a circle contained in a single fiber. We show that the monodromy around an $M$-singularity is a…