Double Kodaira fibrations with small signature

Abstract

Kodaira fibrations are surfaces of general type with a non-isotrivial fibration, which are differentiable fibre bundles. They are known to have positive signature divisible by $4$. Examples are known only with signature 16 and more. We review approaches to construct examples of low signature which admit two independent fibrations. Special attention is paid to ramified covers of product of curves which we analyse by studying the monodromy action for bundles of punctured curves. As a by-product we obtain a classification of all fix-point-free automorphisms on curves of genus at most $9$.