Combining Igusa’s conjectures on exponential sums and monodromy with semicontinuity of the minimal exponent

We combine two of Igusa’s conjectures with recent semicontinuity results by Mustaţă and Popa to form a new, natural conjecture about bounds for exponential sums. These bounds have a deceivingly simple and general formulation in terms of degrees and dimensions only. We provide evidence consisting partly of adaptations of already known results about Igusa’s conjecture on exponential sums, but also some new evidence like for all polynomials in up to $4$ variables. We show that, in turn, these bounds imply consequences for Igusa’s (strong) monodromy conjecture. The bounds are related to estimates for major arcs appearing in the circle method for local-global principles.