Related papers: Commutators, Lefschetz fibrations and the signatur…

The first aim of this paper is to give four types of examples of surface bundles over surfaces with non-zero signature. The first example is with base genus 2, a prescribed signature, a 0-section and the fiber genus greater than a certain…

For each g > 2 and h > 1, we explicitly construct (1) fiber sum indecomposable relatively minimal genus g Lefschetz fibrations over genus h surfaces whose monodromies lie in the Torelli group, (2) fiber sum indecomposable genus g surface…

The signature of a surface bundle over a surface is known to be divisible by 4. It is also known that the signature vanishes if the fiber genus is less than or equal to 2 or the base genus is less than or equal to 1. In this article, we…

We construct universal Lefschetz fibrations, defined in analogy with classical universal bundles. We also introduce the cobordism groups of Lefschetz fibrations, and we see how these groups are quotients of the singular bordism groups via…

We construct symplectic surface bundles over surfaces with positive signatures for all but 18 possible pairs of fiber and base genera. Meanwhile, we determine the commutator lengths of a few new mapping classes.

There exists a (relatively minimal) genus g Lefschetz fibration with only one singular fiber over a closed (Riemann) surface of genus h iff g>2 and h>1. The singular fiber can be chosen to be reducible or irreducible. Other results are that…

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…

In analogy with the vector bundle theory we define universal and strongly universal Lefschetz fibrations over bounded surfaces. After giving a characterization of these fibrations we construct very special strongly universal Lefschetz…

We investigate the possible self-intersection numbers for sections of surface bundles and Lefschetz fibrations over surfaces. When the fiber genus g and the base genus h are positive, we prove that the adjunction bound 2h-2 is the only…

We address the question of existence of sections of fibrations in two settings. First, we show that a bundle with base a finite 2-complex admits a section if and only if the inclusion of the fiber is $\pi_1$-injective and the associated…

We prove that any genus-2 Lefschetz fibration without reducible fibers and with ``transitive monodromy'' is holomorphic. The latter condition comprises all cases where the number of singular fibers is not congruent to 0 modulo 40. An…

In this note we find new relations in the mapping class group of a genus two surface with n boundary components for n=1,..., 8 which induce a genus two Lefschetz fibration $CP^2#13CP^2bar \to S^2$ with n disjoint sections. As a consequence,…

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…

We give a short proof of a conjecture of Stipsicz on the minimality of fiber sums of Lefschetz fibrations, which was proved earlier by Usher. We then construct the first examples of genus g > 1 Lefschetz fibrations on minimal symplectic…

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 prove an upper bound for the first Betti number of a nontrivial genus-$g$ Lefschetz fibration. We also show that if the monodromy of a Lefschetz fibration is transitive with respect to the mapping class group, the Lefschetz fibration is…

Singular fibrations generalize achiral Lefschetz fibrations of 4-manifolds over surfaces while sharing some of their properties. For instance, relatively minimal singular fibrations are determined by their monodromy. We explain how to…

We construct examples of non-isotrivial algebraic families of smooth complex projective curves over a curve of genus 2. This solves a problem from Kirby's list of problems in low-dimensional topology. Namely, we show that 2 is the smallest…

For any closed oriented surface F of genus at least three, we prove the existence of foliated F-bundles over surfaces such that the signatures of the total spaces are non-zero. We can arrange that the total holonomy of the horizontal…

We introduce an idea of constructing Lefschetz fibrations of Weinstein manifolds from Weinstein handle decompositions on them. We prove theorems that formulate the idea for the cases of cotangent bundles and some plumbings. As a corollary,…