The integral monodromy of isolated quasihomogeneous singularities (Q2164770)

Matrices in \(GL(n,\mathbb{Z})\) arise in algebraic geometry as monodromy matrices. It is easy to find their conjugacy classes in \(GL(n,\mathbb{C})\), but very difficult to find these in \(GL(n,\mathbb{Z})\). This paper gives some general algebraic tools to deal with block-diagonal matrices whose blocks are companion matrices. It applies them to the case of integral monodromy matrices of isolated quasihomogeneous singularities. The authors prove an old almost untouched conjecture of Orlik for all invertible polynomials and all iterated Thom-Sebastiani sums of chain type singularities and cycle type singularities. The main part of the paper is purely algebraic. It provides tools for dealing with sums and tensor products of \(\mathbb{Z}\)-lattices with automorphisms of finite order and with cyclic generators. The calculations use properties of unit roots, cyclotomic polynomomials, their resultants and discriminants.