Monodromy Eigenvalues of Milnor Fibers for Line Arrangements

Source abstract

It is an important problem to know whether the monodromy on the cohomology of Milnor fibers associated to hyperplane arrangements is a combinatorial invariant. In this paper, we obtain a combinatorial vanishing criterion for certain eigenspaces of this algebraic monodromy in line arrangements. Combining with Hirzebruch inequality, which is a consequence of Bogomolov--Miyaoka--Yau inequality, we prove that for essential complex line arrangements, the eigenvalues of the monodromy have orders at most five. This is a partial progress toward Papadima--Suciu conjecture and proves Salvetti--Serventi connectivity conjecture. For essential complexified real line arrangements, the monodromy order is improved to at most four thanks to Shnurnikov's inequality. This confirms Papadima--Suciu conjecture for real line arrangements and also Yoshinaga's sharp pair conjecture.