Thin monodromy in Sp(4)

Abstract

We show that some hypergeometric monodromy groups in Sp(4,Z) split as free or amalgamated products and hence by cohomological considerations give examples of Zariski dense, non-arithmetic monodromy groups of real rank 2. In particular, we show that the monodromy of the natural quotient of the Dwork family of quintic threefolds in P^{4} splits as Z*Z/5. As a consequence, for a smooth quintic threefold X we show that a certain group of autoequivalences of the bounded derived category of coherent sheaves is an Artin group of dihedral type.