On two pencils of cubic curves

Abstract

We give two examples of plane curve arrangements of pencil type which are very close to line arrangements, though the action of the monodromy operator on the first cohomology group of the Milnor Fiber has eigenvalues of order 5 and 6, showing that surprising situations can occur for larger classes of curve arrangements than for line arrangements. Our computations rely on the algorithm given by A. Dimca and G. Sticlaru which detects the non trivial monodromy eigenspaces of free curves.

11 pages