On the discriminant of the Artin component
We study threefolds having as hyperplane section a smooth surface with an elliptic fibration. We first give a general theorem about the possible embeddings of such surfaces with Picard number two. More precise results are then proved for Weierstrass fibrations, both of rank two and higher. In particular we prove that a Weierstrass fibration of rank two that is not a K3 surface is not hyperplane section of a locally complete intersection threefold and we give some conditions, for many embeddings...
We deal with a reducible projective surface with so-called Zappatic singularities, which are a generalization of normal crossings. First we compute the -genus of , i.e. the dimension of the vector space of global sections of the dualizing sheaf . Then we prove that, when is smoothable, i.e. when is the central fibre of a flat family parametrized by a disc, with smooth general fibre, then the -genus of the fibres of is constant.