Deformations of sandwiched surface singularities and the minimal model program

Abstract

We investigate the correspondence between three theories of deformations of rational surface singularities: de Jong and van Straten's picture deformations, Koll\'ar's P-resolutions, and Pinkham's smoothings of negative weights. We provide an explicit method for obtaining, from a given deformation in one theory, deformations in other theories that parameterize the same irreducible components of the deformation space of the singularity. We employ the semi-stable minimal model program significantly for this purpose. We prove Koll\'ar conjecture for various sandwiched surface singularities as an application.