Moduli spaces of surfaces and monodromy invariants

Abstract

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 questions about complex deformation vs. symplectomorphism vs. diffeomorphism from the perspective of one explicit family of examples; the paper also contains some remarks which were not in earlier papers.

37 pages, to appear in the Proceedings of 13th Gökova Geometry-Topology Conference