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, Kollár'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 Kollár conjecture for various sandwiched surface singularities as an application.

68 pages. Added one more (combinatorial) incidence matrix corresponding to the QHD components of W(p,q,r)