Fundamental groups of tangent conic-line arrangements with singularities up to order 6 (Q884973)

The main result of this paper is the computation of the fundamental group of the complement (in the complex projective plane) of a curve composed by two tangent conics, described by a balanced presentation with two generators and relations. This theorem allows the authors to list all possible fundamental groups for the complement of a conic-line arrangement consisting of two tangent conics and one or two additional lines: in the first case (one additional line) there are exactly three different possible groups, in the second one (two additional lines) the possible groups are five. All these groups are proved to be \textit{big}, i.e. containing a free subgroup with two or more generators. The main tools that are used for proving these results are the braid monodromy techniques of Moishezon-Teicher, the Enriques-Van Kampen Theorem and some group calculations for studying the fundamental groups. The paper ends with two conjectures concerning the fundamental groups of the complements of conic-line arrangements with two tangent conics and \(n\) lines.