Double Kodaira Fibrations

The existence of a Kodaira fibration, i.e., of a fibration of a compact complex surface S onto a complex curve B which is a differentiable but not a holomorphic bundle, forces the geographical slope ν(S) = c 1 (S)/c2(S) to lie in the interval (2, 3). But up to now all the known examples had slope ν(S) ≤ 2 + 1/3. In this paper we consider a special class of surfaces admitting two such Kodaira fibrations, and we can construct many new examples, showing in particular that there are such fibrations attaining the slope ν(S) = 2 + 2/3. We are able to explicitly describe the moduli space of such class of surfaces, and we show the existence of Kodaira fibrations which yield rigid surfaces. We observe an interesting connection between the problem of the slope of Kodaira fibrations and a ’packing’ problem for automorphisms of algebraic curves of genus ≥ 2. Version February 2, 2008