Families of ICIS with constant total Milnor number

Abstract

We show that a family of isolated complete intersection singularities (ICIS) with constant total Milnor number has no coalescence of singularities. This extends a well known result of Gabrielov, Lazzeri and L\^e for hypersurfaces. We use A'Campo's theorem to see that the Lefschetz number of the generic monodromy of the ICIS is zero when the ICIS is singular. We give a pair applications for families of functions on ICIS which extend also some known results for functions on a smooth variety.