Vanishing cycle

In mathematics, vanishing cycles are studied in singularity theory and other parts of algebraic geometry. They are those homology cycles of a smooth fiber in a family which vanish in the singular fiber.

For example, in a map from a connected complex surface to the complex projective line, a generic fiber is a smooth Riemann surface of some fixed genus g and, generically, there will be isolated points in the target whose preimages are nodal curves. If you consider an isolated critical value and a small loop around it, in each fiber, one can find a smooth loop such that the singular fiber can be obtained by pinching that loop to a point. The loop in the smooth fibers gives an element of the first homology group of a surface, and the monodromy of the critical value is defined to be the monodromy of the first homology of the fibers as the loop is traversed, i.e. an invertible map of the first homology of a (real) surface of genus g.