Durfee-type inequality for complete intersection surface singularities

Abstract

We prove that the signature of the Milnor fiber of smoothings of a $2$-dimensional isolated complete intersection singularity does not exceed the negative number determined by the geometric genus, the embedding dimension and the number of irreducible components of the exceptional set of the minimal resolution, which implies Durfee's weak conjecture and a partial answer to Kerner--N\'emethi's conjecture.