On sections of hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations (Q1929146)

Given a Lefschetz pencil on a four-manifold one can blow-up the base locus (where all fibres intersect) to obtain a Lefschetz fibration. The exceptional spheres of the blow-up are then sections of the fibration. If one excises these sections, one is left with a Lefschetz fibration on a manifold with boundary. The monodromies are now diffeomorphisms of a surface with boundary which refine the underlying monodromy on the closed fibres of the pencil (in the sense that the monodromy of the pencil can be recovered by gluing in discs to fill the boundary components). For instance, the lantern relation in the mapping class group of a sphere with four boundary components arises in this way from the global monodromy of the conic fibration on the complex projective plane. To visualise sections of a Lefschetz fibration (for instance, representing them in a Kirby diagram) it is therefore useful to be able to understand these punctured refinements of the global monodromy (see \textit{M. Korkmaz} and \textit{B. Ozbagci} [Mich. Math. J. 56, No. 1, 77--87 (2008; Zbl 1158.57033)]). The paper under review finds identities amongst words of positive Dehn twists in the mapping class group of a genus \(g\) surface with \(4g+4\) boundary components by starting with relation on an eight-punctured torus and gluing. It is then shown that by capping the boundary components one obtains a well-known hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibration on \(\mathbb CP^2\sharp(4g+5)\overline{\mathbb CP}^2\). This is used to draw the corresponding exceptional spheres on a Kirby diagram.