Monodromy groups of regular elliptic surfaces

Abstract

Monodromy in analytic families of smooth complex surfaces yields groups of isotopy classes of orientation preserving diffeomorphisms for each family member X. For all deformation classes of minimal elliptic surfaces with p_g>q=0, we determine the monodromy group of a representative X, i.e. the group of isometries of the intersection lattice L_X:=H_2/torsion generated by the monodromy action of all families containing X. To this end we construct families such that any isometry is in the group generated by their monodromies or does not respect the invariance of the canonical class or the spinor norm.