Xiao's Conjecture on Canonically Fibered Surfaces

Abstract

A canonically fibered surface is a surface whose canonical series maps it to a curve. Using Miyaoka-Yau inequality, A. Beauville proved that a canonically fibered surface has relative genus at most 5 when its geometric genus is sufficiently large. G. Xiao further conjectured that the relative genus cannot exceed 4. We give a proof of this conjecture.