Stratified Morse theory in arrangements (Q851486)

This is a survey of the main results from the authors' five papers on the cohomology of local systems on complements of complex hyperplane arrangements, culminating in explicit description and analysis of the Gauss-Manin connections associated with cohomology of rank-one local systems. Let \(\mathcal A\) be such an arrangement, with complement \(M.\) The starting point is a construction by the first author of a weakly self-indexing, perfect Morse function relative to the Whitney stratification of \({\mathbb C}^\ell\) defined by \(\mathcal A\). This is first used to give a short proof (found independently by \textit{M.~Yoshinaga} [Kodai Math. J. 30, No. 2, 157--194 (2007)]) of the result of Randell and Dimca-Papadima that \(M\) has a minimal cell decomposition. The authors proceed to construct a universal finite-dimensional complex which computes the cohomology, via specialization, of an arbitrary local system on \(M.\) There is a natural linearization of this complex at the trivial local system which for rank-one local systems is chain equivalent to the Aomoto complex of \({\mathcal A}.\) As a consequence the tangent cones at \(1\) to the characteristic varieties of \(M\) in \(({\mathbb C}^*)^n\), the jumping loci for cohomology of rank-one local systems, coincide with the corresponding resonance varieties of \(\mathcal A\) in \({\mathbb C}^n\), the jumping loci for the cohomology of the Orlik-Solomon algebra of \(\mathcal A.\) The authors then consider the space \(B({\mathcal T})\) of all arrangements of fixed combinatorial type \({\mathcal T}\), and the bundle over \(B({\mathcal T})\) of cohomology groups of local systems determined by the parameter \(t=\exp(-2\pi i\lambda)\in ({\mathbb C}^*)^n.\) The monodromy of this bundle is the monodromy of a flat connection, the Gauss-Manin connection, described by a collection of linear maps \(\Omega({\mathcal T},{\mathcal T}')\) where \({\mathcal T}'\) is a codimension-one degeneration of \({\mathcal T}.\) Following \textit{H.~Terao} [Topology Appl. 118, No. 1--2, 255--274 (2002; Zbl 1020.52020)], the authors give a formula for \(\Omega({\mathcal T},{\mathcal T}')\) in terms of the Gauss-Manin connection for general position arrangements, which were computed by Aomoto and Kita. The matrices \(\Omega({\mathcal T},{\mathcal T}')\) are written explicitly using nbc and \(\beta\)nbc bases. It is shown that the entries of \(\Omega({\mathcal T},{\mathcal T}')\) are linear in \(\lambda,\) and that \(\Omega({\mathcal T},{\mathcal T}')\) is diagonalizable with at most one nonzero eigenvalue (under a weak non-resonance assumption). All of this is illustrated in the last section with detailed calculations for the rank-three Selberg arrangement.