Related papers: Hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations and branched co…

Using the recent results of Siebert and Tian about the holomorphicity of genus 2 Lefschetz fibrations with irreducible singular fibers, we show that any genus 2 Lefschetz fibration becomes holomorphic after fiber sum with a holomorphic…

We show that any ruled surface $X$ with $\chi(X) < 0$ admits infinitely many inequivalent Lefschetz pencils of fixed genus and number of base points. Our proof proceeds by building infinitely many inequivalent Lefschetz fibrations on a…

We construct a relation among right-handed Dehn twists in the mapping class group of a compact oriented surface of genus g with 4g+4 boundary components. This relation gives an explicit topological description of 4g+4 disjoint (-1)-sections…

Let $k$ be a field and let $\Omega$ be a universal domain over $k$. Let $f:X \r S$ be a dominant morphism defined over $k$ from a smooth projective variety $X$ to a smooth projective variety $S$ of dimension $\leq 2$ such that the general…

Let (M,\omega) be a symplectic manifold, and Sigma a compact Riemann surface. We define a 2-form on the space of immersed symplectic surfaces in M, and show that the form is closed and non-degenerate, up to reparametrizations. Then we give…

In this paper we construct six-dimensional compact non-K\"ahler Hamiltonian circle manifolds which satisfy the strong Lefschetz property themselves but nevertheless have a non-Lefschetz symplectic quotient. This provides the first known…

The paper continues the discussion of symplectic aspects of Picard-Lefschetz theory begun in "Vanishing cycles and mutation" (this archive). There we explained how to associate to a suitable fibration over a two-dimensional disc a…

A filling Dehn surface in a $3$-manifold $M$ is a generically immersed surface in $M$ that induces a cellular decomposition of $M$. Given a tame link $L$ in $M$ there is a filling Dehn sphere of $M$ that "trivializes" (\emph{diametrically…

We show that a four-manifold admits a boundary Lefschetz fibration over the disc if and only if it is diffeomorphic to $S^1 \times S^3\# n \overline{\mathbb{C} P^2}$, $\# m\mathbb{C} P^2 \#n\overline{\mathbb{C} P^2}$ or $\# m (S^2 \times…

We consider the subspace of the homology of a covering space spanned by lifts of simple closed curves. Our main result is the existence of unbranched covers of surfaces where this is a proper subspace. More generally, for a fixed finite…

For any alternating knot, it is known that the double branched cover of the $3$-sphere branched over the knot is an $L$-space. We show that the three-fold cyclic branched cover is also an $L$-space for any genus one alternating knot.

A surface in the 4-sphere is trivially embedded, if it bounds a 3-dimensional handle body in the 4-sphere. For a surface trivially embedded in the 4-sphere, a diffeomorphism over this surface is extensible if and only if this preserves the…

Every fibration of a projective hyper-K\"ahler fourfold has fibers which are Abelian surfaces. In case the Abelian surface is a Jacobian of a genus two curve, these have been classified by Markushevich. We study those cases where the…

We consider the stable ruled surface $S_1$ over an elliptic curve. There is a unique foliation on $S_1$ transverse to the fibration. The minimal self-intersection sections also define a 2-web. We prove that the 4-web defined by the…

We show that Lang's hyperbolic and function version conjectures hold for surfaces $S$ of general type having a fibration of general type onto a curve $C$. The notion of multiplicity used is natural, but not classical, which leds to orbifold…

In this paper we study a special class of fibrations on Delsarte surfaces. We call these fibrations Delsarte fibrations. We show that after a specific cyclic base change the fibration is the pull back of a fibration with three singular…

We consider surfaces immersed in three-dimensional pseudohermitian manifolds. We define the notion of (p-)mean curvature and of the associated (p-)minimal surfaces, extending some concepts previously given for the (flat) Heisenberg group.…

We show that if M is a surface bundle over S^1 with fiber of genus 2, then for any integer n, M has a finite cover tilde(M) with b_1(tilde(M)) > n. A corollary is that M can be geometrized using only the `non-fiber' case of Thurston's…

Many three dimensional manifolds are two-fold branched covers of the three dimensional sphere. However, there are some that are not. This paper includes exposition about two-fold branched covers and many examples. It shows that there are…

We prove that symplectic 4-manifolds with $b_1 = 0$ and $b^+ > 1$ have nonvanishing Donaldson invariants, and that the canonical class is always a basic class. We also characterize in many situations the basic classes of a Lefschetz…