No label defined (Q4950366)

This note is a slightly expanded abstract of my lecture delivered at the Cetraro Conference ``Geometry of Complex Projective Varieties''. In this talk I reported on a joint work with \textit{Wolfgang Ebeling} which in the meantime appeared under the title ``Donaldson invariants, monodromy groups and singularities'' [Int. J. Math. 1, No. 3, 233-250 (1990; Zbl 0783.57006)]. In his seminal paper \textit{S. K. Donaldson} [Topology 29, No. 3, 257-315 (1990; Zbl 0715.57007)] has introduced a series of invariants for certain closed, differentiable 4-manifolds. These invariants, which are polynomials on the second homology group of the manifold with values in the integers, are very powerful tools for distinguishing between distinct \(C^\infty\)-structures on a fixed topological 4-manifold. In the integrable case, i.e. for manifolds underlying algebraic surfaces, techniques from algebraic geometry can be used to calculate Donaldson's polynomials (in good cases) [\textit{S. K. Donaldson}, loc. cit.; \textit{R. Friedman} and \textit{J. W. Morgan}, Topology Appl. 32, No. 2, 135-139 (1989; Zbl 0694.14013); the author with \textit{A. Van de Ven}, Several complex variables, VI: Complex manifolds, Encycl. Math. Sci. 69, 197-249 (1990); Russian translation in Itogi Nauki Tekh., Ser. Sovrem. Probl. Mat., Fundam. Napravleniya 69, 222-277 (1991; Zbl 0752.14013)]. Forthcoming work of Donaldson will generalize this to the relative case, and will lead to invariants for certain 4-manifolds with boundary a \(\mathbb{Z}\)-homology sphere. Again these invariants are polynomials on the second homology group, but this time take their values in the Floer-homology [\textit{A. Floer}, Commun. Math. Phys. 118, No. 2, 215-240 (1988; Zbl 0684.53027)] of the boundary. In his H. Weyl lectures \textit{M. Atiyah} [Proc. Symp. Pure Math. 48, 285-299 (1988; Zbl 0667.57018)] announced this work and posed the problem to find a method to compute the relative invariants. In our paper [Ebeling and Okonek, loc. cit.] we contribute to this problem again in an essentially algebraic situation. We describe the structure of the Donaldson-Floer invariants for Milnor fibers of certain isolated surface singularities and obtain -- by using a natural compactification in the weighted homogeneous case -- strong non-triviality results. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0930.00040].