On rational cuspidal projective plane curves

In 2002, L. Nicolaescu and the fourth author formulated a very general conjecture which relates the geometric genus of a Gorenstein surface singularity with rational homology sphere link with the Seiberg--Witten invariant (or one of its candidates) of the link. Recently, the last three authors found some counterexamples using superisolated singularities. The theory of superisolated hypersurface singularities with rational homology sphere link is equivalent with the theory of rational cuspidal projective plane curves. In the case when the corresponding curve has only one singular point one knows no counterexample. In fact, in this case the above Seiberg--Witten conjecture led us to a very interesting and deep set of `compatibility properties' of these curves (generalising the Seiberg--Witten invariant conjecture, but sitting deeply in algebraic geometry) which seems to generalise some other famous conjectures and properties as well (for example, the Noether--Nagata or the log Bogomolov--Miyaoka--Yau inequalities). Namely, we provide a set of `compatibility conditions' which conjecturally is satisfied by a local embedded topological type of a germ of plane curve singularity and an integer $d$ if and only if the germ can be realized as the unique singular point of a rational unicuspidal projective plane curve of degree $d$. The conjectured compatibility properties have a weaker version too, valid for any rational cuspidal curve with more than one singular point. The goal of the present article is to formulate these conjectured properties, and to verify them in all the situations when the logarithmic Kodaira dimension of the complement of the corresponding plane curves is strictly less than 2

On rational cuspidal plane curves, open surfaces and local singularities

Let C be an irreducible projective plane curve in the complex projective space P(2). The classification of such curves, up to the action of the automorphism group PGL(3, C) on P(2), is a very difficult open problem with many interesting connections. The main goal is to determine, for a given d, whether there exists a projective plane curve of degree d having a fixed number of singularities of given topological type. In this note we are mainly interested in the case when C is a rational curve. The aim of this article is to present some of the old conjectures and related problems, and to complete them with some results and new conjectures from the recent work of the authors

Topological and arithmetical properties of rational plane curves

We study properties of arrangements of rational plane curves. The existence of such curves with prescribed topological data has a lot of geometric restrictions. We show how to use the theory of singular complex analytic spaces to obtain such restrictions. We also study topological properties of such arrangement