A note on sections of broken Lefschetz fibrations

Abstract: We show that there exists a non-trivial simplified broken Lefschetz fibration which has infinitely many homotopy classes of sections. We also construct a non-trivial simplified broken Lefschetz fibration which has a section with non-negative square. It is known that no Lefschetz fibration satisfies either of the above conditions. Smith proved that every Lefschetz fibration has only finitely many homotopy classes of sections, and Smith and Stipsicz independently proved that a Lefschetz fibration is trivial if it has a section with non-negative square. So our results indicate that there are no generalizations of the above results to broken Lefschetz fibrations. We also give a necessary and sufficient condition for the total space of a simplified broken Lefschetz fibration with a section admitting a spin structure, which is a generalization of Stipsicz's result on Lefschetz fibrations.