I’m back! After a long period of laziness, I’m back. Mainly, because the past week, I’ve been kicking myself in the ass for losing basically all my notes over the past few months, and I have to present at the math department’s new seminar in singularity theory. Aren’t I smart?
The topic? A really useful technique/object used to study the topology of (complex) analytic spaces, called the Milnor fibration. The reason for the quotes in the title is simple: there are several objects and manifold manifestations of this so-called “Milnor fibration.” Hence, I’ll do my best to introduce “the” main idea, and hopefully walk both myself and whatever readers are out there through its different forms.
Let’s start simple, with an innocent question: “Given a complex analytic hypersurface in a complex manifold
, and a point
, how does
‘sit inside’
at
?”
Since we only care about the local behavior (here) of at
in
, without any loss of generality, we can rephrase this as follows:
is a connected open neighborhood of
,
for some (non-constant) complex analytic function germ
. In this form, our innocent question becomes less hand-wavy:
“How does (topologically) ‘sit inside’
at
?”
Wtf do we mean by “sit inside”? We want to know about the “topological type” (i.e., the homeomorphism class of the pair ), but more importantly, we want to know how
is embedded as a subset of
. For this, we mean the local, ambient, topological type of
in
at 0, given by the datum of a triple
, where
is an open neighborhood of 0 in
. In our case, it suffices to consider triples of the form
, where
denotes the open ball centered at the origin in
. For the sake of horribly cramped notation, I’ll suppress the dimension, and hope you can keep up.
From general topological stuff, if we can determine the structure of a triple , we can understand
.
Now, the question becomes:
“What is the topological type of the triple ?”
But wait, it gets better (due to a result of Milnor):
Theorem (Milnor):
For
sufficiently small, there is a homeomorphism of triples
. Moreover, the topological type of this triple is independent of
(for
sufficiently small).
Where “Cone” is the topological cone. That is, if is a topological space,
. This is just a fancy way of saying “all the interesting topological behavior occurs on the boundary of the ball.” So…if we can figure out how this space
(called the Real Link of
at 0) is embedded inside
, then we’ve (more or less) answered our question. It’s important to note that the real link of
at 0 is actually a well-defined object, since the topological type of the above triple is independent of epsilon, when epsilon is chosen “small enough”.
This is basically what Milnor strove to answer with his Fibration. But, you’ll have to wait for the sequel to see that in action.
Before I leave, I wanted to talk about some nice cases/descriptions of the real link of :
Lemma:
Let
be a real analytic subset of
containing the origin, such that
is a real analytic submanifold of
. Then, for
sufficiently small,
transversely intersects the
-sphere
proof:
Suppose, for the sake of contradiction, that no such exists. Then, for all
, there is some
such that
Let be the (real analytic) “norm-squared” function on
, so that
. In addition, since the origin is the only critical point of
,
. Then, the above implies
(where
is the critical locus of
, restricted to
, which is a real analytic subset of
). Since we get such a
for all
, it follows that
, so we can apply the Curve Selection Lemma: there exists a real analytic curve
such that
, and for
,
. What then?
When in doubt, take the derivative of something: for ,
since . That is,
. BUT,
, and
is a real analytic function, so we actually get
for ALL
. BUT,
iff
, CONTRADICTION!
And the lemma follows.
Done.
So…here, if 0 is an isolated critical point of , this tells us that (for small enough
), that the real link
is a smooth submanifold of
, of real dimension
.
More later.