Reading the log canonical threshold of a plane curve singularity from its Newton polyhedron

Abstract

There is a proposition due to Kollár as reported by Kollár (Proceedings of the summer research institute, Santa Cruz, CA, USA, July 9–29, 1995, American Mathematical Society, Providence, 1997) on computing log canonical thresholds of certain hypersurface germs using weighted blowups, which we extend to weighted blowups with non-negative weights. Using this, we show that the log canonical threshold of a convergent complex power series is at most 1/c, where \((c, \ldots , c)\) is a point on a facet of its Newton polyhedron. Moreover, in the case \(n = 2\), if the power series is weakly normalised with respect to this facet or the point (c, c) belongs to two facets, then we have equality. This generalises a theorem of Varchenko 1982 to non-isolated singularities.