Four-manifolds admitting hyperelliptic broken Lefschetz fibrations

Abstract

We introduce hyperelliptic simplified (more generally, directed) broken Lefschetz fibrations, which is a generalization of hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations. We construct involutions on the total spaces of such fibrations of genus $g\geq 3$ and extend these involutions to the four-manifolds obtained by blowing up the total spaces. The extended involutions induce double branched coverings over blown up sphere bundles over the sphere. We also show that the regular fiber of such a fibration of genus $g\geq 3$ represents a non-trivial rational homology class of the total space.