Deformations of rational surface singularities and reflexive modules with an application to flops

Abstract

Blowing up a rational surface singularity in a reflexive module gives a (any) partial resolution dominated by the minimal resolution. The main theorem shows how deformations of the pair (singularity, module) relates to deformations of the corresponding pair of partial resolution and locally free strict transform, and to deformations of the underlying spaces. The results imply some recent conjectures on small resolutions and flops.