Monodromy Eigenvalues of Milnor Fibers for Line Arrangements

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.