Symplectic Lefschetz fibrations with arbitrary fundamental groups

Abstract

In this paper we give an explicit construction of a symplectic Lefschetz fibration whose total space is a smooth compact four dimensional manifold with a prescribed fundamental group. We also study the numerical properties of the sections in symplectic Lefschetz fibrations and their relation to the structure of the monodromy group.Comment: 45 pages, LaTeX2e. Minor mistakes corrected. New appendix by Ivan Smith added, proving the non-existence of SLF with monodromy contained in the Torelli grou