Some computations on the characteristic variety of a line arrangement (Q2210184)

In this nice paper the authors find monodromy formulae for line arrangements that are fibered with respect to the projection from one point in order to study \(0\)-dimensional translated components in the first characteristic varieties of the \(\mathcal{R}(2n)\) arrangements. An abelian local system \(\mathcal{L}_{\rho}\) on the complement \(\mathcal{M}(\mathcal{A})\) of an arrangement of hyperplanes \(\mathcal{A} \subset \mathbb{C}^{N}\) is defined by choosing one non-zero complex number \(\rho_{H}\) for each hyperplane \(H \in \mathcal{A}\). The \(i\)-th characteristic variety of \(\mathcal{A}\) is the subvariety \[V_{i}(\mathcal{A}) = \{ (\rho_{H})_{H \in \mathcal{A}} \in (\mathbb{C}^{*})^{r}:\dim(H_{i}(\mathcal{M}(\mathcal{A}); \mathcal{L}_{\rho})) > 0 \},\] where \(r := \# \mathcal{A}\). The main problem is to understand whether the characteristic varieties are combinatorially determined which turns out to be true for their homogeneous part corresponding to the resonance variety. Meanwhile, the translated components of the characteristic variety are not well understood yet. In the paper under review the authors study the case when \(N=2\) and they verify that the arrangement \(\mathcal{R}(2n)\) with \(n\geq 5\) determined by a regular \(n\)-gon and its diagonals produces \(\phi(n)\) translated \(0\)-dimensional essential components in the characteristic variety, where \(\phi\) denotes the Euler function. The arrangement \(\mathcal{R}(2n)\) belongs to the class of fibered arrangements, the projection through its midpoint gives a fibration of the complement of \(\mathcal{M}(\mathcal{A})\) over \(B = \mathbb{C} \setminus \{n-1 \text{ points}\}\) with fiber \(F = \mathbb{C} \setminus \{n \text{ points}\}\). In order to obtain the mentioned result about translated \(0\)-dimensional components the authors use algebraic complexes which compute the parallel transport and the monodromy of the first homology group of the fiber.