Irreducibility of Equisingular Families of Curves - Improved Conditions

Abstract

In math.AG/0108089 we gave sufficient conditions for the irreducibility of the family V of irreducible curves in the linear system |D| with precisely r singular points of topological respectively analytical types S1,...,Sr on several classes of smooth projective surfaces S. The conditions where of the form (tau&#39;(S1)+2)^2 +...+ (tau&#39;(Sr)+2)^2 < c*(D-K)^2, where tau&#39; is some invariant of singularity types, K is the canonical divisor of S and c is some constant. In the present paper we improve this condition, that is the constant c, by a factor 9.