A note on sections of broken Lefschetz fibrations

We show that there exists a non-trivial simplified broken Lefschetz fibration which has infinitely many homotopy classes of sections. We also construct a non-trivial simplified broken Lefschetz fibration which has a section with non-negative square. It is known that no Lefschetz fibration satisfies either of the above conditions. Smith proved that every Lefschetz fibration has only finitely many homotopy classes of sections, and Smith and Stipsicz independently proved that a Lefschetz fibration is trivial if it has a section with non-negative square. So our results indicate that there are no generalizations of the above results to broken Lefschetz fibrations. We also give a necessary and sufficient condition for the total space of a simplified broken Lefschetz fibration with a section admitting a spin structure, which is a generalization of Stipsicz's result on Lefschetz fibrations.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures. We correct the proofs of Theorem 1.2 and Theorem 1.4 and the argument in Example 5.4. We also modify minor error

Broken Lefschetz fibrations and mapping class groups

The purpose of this note is to explain a combinatorial description of closed smooth oriented 4-manifolds in terms of positive Dehn twist factorizations of surface mapping classes, and further explore these connections. This is obtained via monodromy representations of simplified broken Lefschetz fibrations on 4-manifolds, for which we provide an extension of Hurwitz moves that allows us to uniquely determine the isomorphism class of a broken Lefschetz fibration. We furthermore discuss broken Lefschetz fibrations whose monodromies are contained in special subgroups of the mapping class group; namely, the hyperelliptic mapping class group and in the Torelli group, respectively, and present various results on them which extend or contrast with those known to hold for honest Lefschetz fibrations. Lastly, we show that there are 4-manifolds admitting infinitely many pairwise nonisomorphic relatively minimal broken Lefschetz fibrations with isotopic regular fibers.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figure