Related papers: Lefschetz fibrations and the Hodge bundle
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…
Symplectic Lefschetz fibrations can be described via classifying maps with values in the Deligne-Mumford compactification of the moduli space of curves, by means of constructions relying on symplectic geometry. In this note we prove the…
In this paper we give an explicit construction of a symplectic Lefschetz fibration whose total space is a smooth compact four dimensional manifold with a prescribed fundamental group. We also study the numerical properties of the sections…
We study the classification of Lefschetz fibrations up to stabilization by fiber sum operations. We show that for each genus there is a `universal' fibration f^0_g with the property that, if two Lefschetz fibrations over S^2 have the same…
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…
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 show how certain stabilizations produce infinitely many closed oriented 4-manifolds which are the total spaces of genus g surface bundles (resp. Lefschetz fibrations) over genus h surfaces and have non-zero signature, but do not admit…
We study Lefschetz pencils on symplectic four-manifolds via the associated spheres in the moduli spaces of curves, and in particular their intersections with certain natural divisors. An invariant defined from such intersection numbers can…
The topology of broken Lefschetz fibrations is studied by means of handle decompositions. We consider a slight generalization of round handles, and describe the handle diagrams for all that appear in dimension four. We establish simplified…
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…
We construct noncomplex smooth 4-manifolds which admit genus-2 Lefschetz fibrations over S^2. The fibrations are necessarily hyperelliptic, and the resulting 4-manifolds are not even homotopy equivalent to complex surfaces. Furthermore,…
We describe Lefschetz-Bott fibrations on complex line bundles over symplectic manifolds explicitly. As an application, we construct more than one strong symplectic filling of the link of the $A_{k}$-type singularity. In the appendix, we…
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…
We construct examples of Lefschetz fibrations with prescribed singular fibers. By taking differences of pairs of such fibrations with the same singular fibers, we obtain new examples of surface bundles over surfaces with non-zero signature.…
We prove that, for any Morse function on a compact manifold and any adapted gradient satisfying the Morse-Smale condition, there is a homotopically unique complex-valued symplectic Lefschetz fibration on the cotangent bundle whose…
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…
We show how to construct broken, achiral Lefschetz fibrations on arbitrary smooth, closed, oriented 4-manifolds. These are generalizations of Lefschetz fibrations over the 2-sphere, where we allow Lefschetz singularities with the…
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 consider structures analogous to symplectic Lefschetz pencils in the context of a closed 4-manifold equipped with a `near-symplectic' structure (ie, a closed 2-form which is symplectic outside a union of circles where it vanishes…
We initiate a study of positive multisections of Lefschetz fibrations via positive factorizations in framed mapping class groups of surfaces. Using our methods, one can effectively capture various interesting symplectic surfaces in…