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, these examples show that fiber sums of holomorphic Lefschetz fibrations do not necessarily admit complex structures.
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 extends a recent result of Ozbagci and Stipsicz.
The existence of a positive allowable Lefschetz fibration on a compact Stein surface with boundary was established by Loi and Piergallini by using branched covering techniques. Here we give an alternative simple proof of this fact and construct explicitly the vanishing cycles of the Lefschetz fibration, obtaining a direct identification of the set of compact Stein manifolds with positive allowable Lefschetz fibrations over a 2-disk. In the process we associate to every compact Stein manifold infinitely many nonequivalent such Lefschetz fibrations.
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 in symplectic Lefschetz fibrations and their relation to the structure of the monodromy group.
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 the universal Lefschetz fibrations.
We show that hyperelliptic symplectic Lefschetz fibrations are symplectically birational to two-fold covers of rational ruled surfaces, branched in a symplectically embedded surface. This reduces the classification of genus 2 fibrations to the classification of certain symplectic submanifolds in rational ruled surfaces.
Loi-Piergallini and Akbulut-Ozbagci showed that every compact Stein surface admits a Lefschetz fibration over the 2-disk with bounded fibers. In this note we give a more intrinsic alternative proof of this result.
We give a method for constructing a shadowed polyhedron from a divide. The 4-manifold reconstructed from a shadowed polyhedron admits the structure of a Lefschetz fibration if it satisfies a certain property, which we call the LF-property. We will show that the shadowed polyhedron constructed from a divide satisfies this property and the Lefschetz fibration of this polyhedron is isomorphic to the Lefschetz fibration of the divide. Furthermore, applying the same technique to certain free divides we will show that the links of those free divides are fibered with positive monodromy.
We prove upper bounds for the number of critical points in semistable symplectic Lefschetz fibrations. We also obtain a new lower bound for the number of nonseparting vanishing cycles in Lefschetz pencils, and reprove the known lower bounds for the commutator lengths of Dehn twists.
A hyperelliptic broken Lefschetz fibration is a generalization of a hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibration. We construct and compute a local signature of hyperelliptic directed broken Lefschetz fibrations by generalizing Endo's local signature of hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations. It is described by his local signature and a rational-valued homomorphism on the subgroup of the hyperelliptic mapping class group which preserves a simple closed curve setwise.
In this note we introduce certain invariants of real Lefschetz fibrations. We call these invariants {\em real Lefschetz chains}. We prove that if the fiber genus is greater than 1, then the real Lefschetz chains are complete invariants of real Lefschetz fibrations with only real critical values. If however the fiber genus is 1, real Lefschetz chains are not sufficient to distinguish real Lefschetz fibrations. We show that by adding a certain binary decoration to real Lefschetz chains, we get a complete invariant.
For $g\geq 3$, we construct genus-$g$ Lefschetz fibrations over the two-sphere whose slopes are arbitrarily close to $2$. The total spaces of the Lefschetz fibrations can be chosen to be minimal and simply connected. It is also shown that the infimum and the supremum of slopes all Lefschetz fibrations are not realized as slopes.
Chart descriptions are a graphic method to describe monodromy representations of various topological objects. Here we introduce a chart description for hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations, and show that any hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibration can be stabilized by fiber-sum with certain basic Lefschetz fibrations.
Chart descriptions are a graphic method to describe monodromy representations of various topological objects. Here we introduce a chart description for genus-two Lefschetz fibrations, and show that any genus-two Lefschetz fibration can be stabilized by fiber-sum with certain basic Lefschetz fibrations.
We show that there exists a non-trivial simplified broken Lefschetz fibration which has infinitely many homotopy classes of sections. We also construct a non-trivial simplified broken Lefschetz fibration which has a section with non-negative square. It is known that no Lefschetz fibration satisfies either of the above conditions. Smith proved that every Lefschetz fibration has only finitely many homotopy classes of sections, and Smith and Stipsicz independently proved that a Lefschetz fibration is trivial if it has a section with non-negative square. So our results indicate that there are no g…
Auroux, Donaldson and Katzarkov introduced broken Lefschetz fibrations as a generalization of Lefshcetz fibrations in order to describe near-symplectic 4-manifolds. We first study monodromy representations of higher sides of genus-1 simplified broken Lefschetz fibrations. We then completely classify diffeomorphism types of such fibrations with connected fibers and with less than six Lefschetz singularities. In these studies, we obtain several families of genus-1 simplified broken Lefschetz fibrations, which we conjecture contain all such fibrations, and determine the diffeomorphism types of th…
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 employ a certain labeled finite graph, called a chart, in a closed oriented surface for describing the monodromy of a(n achiral) Lefschetz fibration over the surface. Applying charts and their moves with respect to Wajnryb's presentation of mapping class groups, we first generalize a signature formula for Lefschetz fibrations over the 2-sphere obtained by Endo and Nagami to that for Lefschetz fibrations over arbitrary closed oriented surface. We then show two theorems on stabilization of Lefschetz fibrations under fiber summing with copies of a typical Lefschetz fibration as generalizations…
A real 3- or 4-manifold has by definition an orientation preserving smooth involution acting on it. We consider Lefschetz fibrations of 4-dimensional manifolds-with-boundary and open book decompositions on their boundary in the existence of a real structure. We prove that there is a real open book which cannot be filled by a real Lefschetz fibration, although it is filled by non-real Lefschetz fibrations.
We produce simply connected, minimal, symplectic Lefschetz fibrations realizing all the lattice points in the symplectic geography plane below the Noether line. This provides a symplectic extension of the classical works populating the complex geography plane with holomorphic Lefschetz fibrations. Our examples are obtained by rationally blowing down Lefschetz fibrations with clustered nodal fibers, the total spaces of which are potentially new homotopy elliptic surfaces. Similarly, clustering nodal fibers on higher genera Lefschetz fibrations on standard rational surfaces, we get rational blow…
Here we prove that up to diffeomorphism every compact Stein manifold W of dimension 2n+2>4 admits a Lefschetz fibration over the two-disk with Stein regular fibers, such that the monodromy of the fibration is a symplectomorphism induced by compositions of right-handed Dehn twists along embedded Lagrangian n-spheres on the generic fiber. This generalizes the Stein surface case of n=1, previously proven by Loi-Piergallini and Akbulut-Ozbagci. More precisely, we show that up to Liouville isomorphism any Weinstein domain W admits a compatible compact convex Lefschetz fibration with Weinstein regul…
We explicitly construct a genus-$3$ Lefschetz fibration over $\mathbb{S}^{2}$ whose total space is $\mathbb{T}^{2}\times \mathbb{S}^{2}\# 6\overline{\mathbb{C} P^{2}}$ using the monodromy of Matsumoto's genus-$2$ Lefschetz fibration. We then construct more genus-$3$ Lefschetz fibrations whose total spaces are exotic minimal symplectic $4$-manifolds $3 \mathbb{C} P^{2} \# q\overline{\mathbb{C} P^{2}}$ for $q=13,\ldots,19$. We also generalize our construction to get genus-$3k$ Lefschetz fibration structure on the $4$-manifold $Σ_{k}\times \mathbb{S}^{2}\# 6\overline{\mathbb{C} P^{2}}$ using the …
We discuss $4$-dimensional achiral Lefschetz fibrations bounding $3$-dimensional open books and study their Lefschetz fibration (LF) embedding in a bounded $6$-dimensional manifold, in the sense of Ghanwat--Pancholi. As an application we give another proof of the fact that every closed orientable $4$-manifold embeds in $S^2 \times S^2 \times S^2$ . We also show that every achiral Lefschetz fibration with hyperelliptic monodromy admits LF embedding in $D^6 = D^2 \times D^4$ and discuss an obstruction to such LF embeddings.
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 observe any holomorphic genus 2 Lefschetz fibration without separating singular fibers admits a section.
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 $g\geq 3$ and extend these involutions to the four-manifolds obtained by blowing up the total spaces. The extended involutions induce double branched coverings over blown up sphere bundles over the sphere. We also show that the regular fiber of such a fibration of genus $g\geq 3$ represents a non-trivial rational homology class of the total space.
We prove that a Lefschetz fibration over the disc that, after compactification, has the same singular fibers as an extremal rational elliptic surface can be obtained by deleting a singular fiber and a section from the rational extremal elliptic surface, i.e. such a Lefschetz fibration is determined up to topological equivalence by its set of singular fibers. We get a complete clasification of Lefschetz fibrations with 2 $I_1$ fibers as a byproduct of our results. The proof is inspired by homological mirror symmetry and Karpov--Nogin's theorem on constructivity of helices on del Pezzo surfaces.…
The broken genera are orientation preserving diffeomorphism invariants of closed oriented 4-manifolds, defined via broken Lefschetz fibrations. We study the properties of the broken genera invariants, and calculate them for various 4-manifolds, while showing that the invariants are sensitive to exotic smooth structures.
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 fibrations when the fiber is the torus or an orientable surface with connected boundary and the base surface is the disk. As a by-product we also get some immersion results for 4-dimensional 2-handlebodies.
We consider complex surfaces, viewed as smooth $4$-dimensional manifolds, that admit hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations over the $2$-sphere. In this paper, we show that the minimal number of singular fibers of such fibrations is equal to $2g+4$ for even $g\geq4$. For odd $g\geq7$, we show that the number is greater than or equal to $2g+6$. Moreover, we discuss the minimal number of singular fibers in all hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations over the $2$-sphere as well.
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 fibration.
In this article we study Lefschetz fibration structures on knot surgery 4-manifolds obtained from an elliptic surface E(2) using Kanenobu knots $K$. As a result, we get an infinite family of simply connected mutually diffeomorphic 4-manifolds coming from a pair of inequivalent Kanenobu knots. We also obtain an infinite family of simply connected symplectic 4-manifolds, each of which admits more than one inequivalent Lefschetz fibration structures of the same generic fiber.
Every finitely presented group is the fundamental group of the total space of a Lefschetz fibration. This follows from results of Gompf and Donaldson, and was also proved by Amoros-Bogomolov-Katzarkov-Pantev. We give another proof by providing the monodromy explicitly. We then define the genus of a finitely presented group $Γ$ to be the minimal genus of a Lefschetz fibration with fundamental group $Γ$. We also give some estimates of the genus of certain groups.
We show that there exists an admissible nonorientable genus $g$ Lefschetz fibration with only one singular fiber over a closed orientable surface of genus $h$ if and only if $g \geq 4$ and $h \geq 1$.
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 of a hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibration of genus g on the manifold {CP}^2#(4g+5){-CP}^2.
We consider simply-connected $4$-manifolds admitting Lefschetz fibrations over the $2$-sphere. We explicitly construct nonhyperelliptic and hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations of genus $4$ on simply-connected $4$-manifolds which are exotic symplectic $4$-manifolds in the homeomorphism classes of $\mathbb{C}P^{2}\#8\overline{\mathbb{C} P^{2}}$ and $\mathbb{C} P^{2}\#9\overline{\mathbb{C} P^{2}}$, respectively. From these, we provide upper bounds for the minimal number of singular fibers of such fibrations. In addition, we prove that this number is equal to $18$ for $g=3$ when such fibrations are…
In this article we construct a family of knot surgery $4$-manifolds admitting arbitrarily many nonisomorphic Lefschetz fibration structures with the same genus fiber. We obtain such families by performing knot surgery on an elliptic surface $E(2)$ using connected sums of fibered knots obtained by Stallings twist from a slice knot $3_1 \sharp 3^*_1$. By comparing their monodromy groups induced from the corresponding monodromy factorizations, we show that they admit mutually nonisomorphic Lefschetz fibration structures.
In this article, we generalize the classification of genus one Lefschetz fibrations to genus one simplified broken Lefschetz fibrations, which have fibers of genera one and zero. We classify genus one Lefschetz fibrations over the 2-disk with certain non-trivial global monodromies using chart descriptions, and identify the 4-manifolds admitting genus one simplified broken Lefschetz fibrations.
It is known that every finitely presented group is the fundamental group of the total space of a Lefschetz fibration. In this paper, we give another proof which improves the result of Korkmaz. In addition, Korkmaz defined the genus of a finitely presented group. We also evaluate upper bounds for genera of some finitely presented groups.
We construct new families of non-hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations by applying the daisy substitutions to the families of words $(c_1c_2 \cdots c_{2g-1}c_{2g}{c_{2g+1}}^2c_{2g}c_{2g-1} \cdots c_2c_1)^2 = 1$, $(c_1c_2 \cdots c_{2g}c_{2g+1})^{2g+2} = 1$, and $(c_1c_2 \cdots c_{2g-1}c_{2g})^{2(2g+1)} = 1$ in the mapping class group $Γ_{g}$ of the closed orientable surface of genus $g$, and study the sections of these Lefschetz fibrations. Furthemore, we show that the total spaces of some of these Lefschetz fibraions are irreducible exotic $4$-manifolds, and compute their Seiberg-Witten invariant…
In his Ph.D. thesis, Burak Ozbagci described an algorithm computing signatures of Lefschetz fibrations where the input is a factorization of the monodromy into a product of Dehn twists. In this note, we give a reformulation of Ozbagci's algorithm which becomes much easier to implement. Our main tool is Wall's non-additivity formula applied to what we call partial fiber sum decomposition of a Lefschetz fibration over 2-disk. We show that our algorithm works for bordered Lefschetz fibrations over disk and it yields a formula for the signature of branched covers where the branched loci are regula…
We give a maximal set of disjoint $(-1)$-sections of the well-known Lefschetz fibration constructed by Matsumoto, Cadavid and Korkmaz. In fact, we obtain several such sets for a fixed genus, which implies that the Matsumoto-Cadavid-Korkmaz Lefschetz fibration has more than one supporting minimal Lefschetz pencils. We also determine the diffeomorphism types of the obtained supporting minimal Lefschetz pencils.
We define a new invariant $w$ for hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations over closed oriented surfaces, which counts the number of Dirac braids included intrinsically in the monodromy, by using chart description introduced by the second author. As an application, we prove that two hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations of genus $g$ over a given base space are stably isomorphic if and only if they have the same numbers of singular fibers of each type and they have the same value of $w$ if $g$ is odd. We also give examples of pair of hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations with the same numbers of singular f…
In this paper, we give some relations in the mapping class groups of oriented closed surfaces in the form that a product of a small number of right hand Dehn twists is equal to a single commutator. Consequently, we find upper bounds for the minimal number of singular fibers in a Lefschetz fibration over the torus.
It was shown by Usher that any fiber sum of Lefschetz fibrations over $S^2$ is minimal, which was conjectured by Stipsicz. We prove that the converse does not hold by showing that there exists an indecomposable minimal genus-2 Lefschetz fibration.
We show that totally real elliptic Lefschetz fibrations that admit a real section are classified by their "real loci" which is nothing but an $S^1$-valued Morse function on the real part of the total space. We assign to each such real locus a certain combinatorial object that we call a \emph{necklace diagram}. On the one hand, each necklace diagram corresponds to an isomorphism class of a totally real elliptic Lefschetz fibration that admits a real section, and on the other hand, it refers to a decomposition of the identity into a product of certain matrices in $PSL(2,\Z)$. Using an algorithm …
We show that the minimal number of singular fibers $N(g,1)$ in a genus-$g$ Lefschetz fibration over the torus is at least $3$. As an application, we show that $N(g, 1) \in \{ 3, 4\}$ for $g\ge 5$, $N(g, 1) \in \{3, 4,5 \}$ for $g= 3, 4$ and $N(2,1) = 7$.
We provide a complete set of moves relating any two Lefschetz fibrations over the disk having as their total space the same 4-dimensional 2-handlebody up to 2-equivalence. As a consequence, we also obtain moves relating diffeomorphic 3-dimensional open books, providing a different approach to an analogous previous result by Harer.
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 4-manifolds which, up to diffeomorphisms of the summands, admit unique decompositions as fiber sums.
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 Lefschetz fibration. We also show these surgered manifolds admit near-symplectic structures and prove more generally that achiral Lefschetz fibrations with sections have near-symplectic structures. As a corollary to our proof we obtain an alternate proof of Gompf's result on the existence of symplectic structures on Lefschetz pencils.
Shapes of four dimensional spaces can be studied effectively via maps to standard surfaces. We explain, and illustrate by quintessential examples, how to simplify such generic maps on 4-manifolds topologically, in order to derive simple decompositions into much better understood manifold pieces. Our methods not only allow us to produce various interesting families of examples, but also to establish a correspondence between simplified broken Lefschetz fibrations and simplified trisections of closed, oriented 4-manifolds.
Using theorems of Eliashberg and McDuff, Etnyre [Et] proved that the intersection form of a symplectic filling of a contact 3-manifold supported by planar open book is negative definite. In this paper, we prove a signature formula for allowable Lefschetz fibrations over $D^2$ with planar fiber by computing Maslov index appearing in Wall's non-additivity formula. The signature formula leads to an alternative proof of Etnyre's theorem via works of Niederkrüger and Wendl [NWe] and Wendl [We]. Conversely, Etnyre's theorem, together with the existence theorem of Stein structures on Lefschetz fibrat…
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 show that the total space of a Lefschetz-Bott fibration over the unit disk serves as a strong symplectic filling of a contact manifold compatible with an open book induced by the fibration.
We investigate the bounded cohomology of Lefschetz fibrations. If a Lefschetz fibration has regular fiber of genus at least 2 and it has at least two distinct vanishing cycles, we show that its Euler class is not bounded. As a consequence, we exclude the existence of negatively curved metrics on Lefschetz fibrations with more than one singular fiber.
Questions of geography of various classes of $4$-manifolds have been a central motivating question in $4$-manifold topology. Baykur and Korkmaz asked which small, simply connected, minimal $4$-manifolds admit a genus $2$ Lefschetz fibration. They were able to classify all the possible homeomorphism types and realize all but one with the exception of a genus $2$ Lefschetz fibration on a symplectic $4$-manifold homeomorphic, but not diffeomorphic to $3 \mathbb{CP}^2 \# 11\overline{\mathbb{CP}}^2$. We give a positive factorization of type $(10,10)$ that corresponds to such a genus $2$ Lefschetz f…
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 handlebody and monodromy representations for a certain subclass of broken Lefschetz fibrations/pencils, while showing that all near-symplectic closed 4-manifolds can be supported by these a la Auroux, Donaldson, Katzarkov. Various constructions of broken Lefschetz fibrations and a generalization of the symplectic fiber sum operation to the near-symplectic se…