On Kodaira fibrations with invariant cohomology (Q1983189)

A Kodaira fibration is a compact complex surface endowed with a holomorphic submersion onto a complex curve such that the fibers have nonconstant moduli. Several authors gave examples of Kodaira fibrations as coverings of a product of curves. These have nontrivial holomorphic invariants in degree 1 \(\mathbb Q\)-cohomology, but this is not always the case, i.e. there are examples without such invariants. In this paper it is proved that if the dimension of the holomorphic invariants is 1 or 2, then the surface admits a branch covering over a product of curves, and this one induces an isomorphism on rational cohomology in degree 1. Also, Kodaira fibrations with holomorphic sections are studied, and it is shown that for questions of monodromy there is no crucial difference between having a holomorphic section or not.