Hermitian $(a, b)$-modules and Saito's "higher residue pairings"

Abstract: Following the work of Daniel Barlet ([Bar97]) and Ridha Belgrade ([Bel01]) the aim of this article is the study of the existence of $(a, b)$-hermitian forms on regular $(a, b)$-modules. We show that every regular $(a,b)$-module with a non-degenerate bilinear form can be written in an unique way as a direct sum of $(a, b)$-modules $E_i$ that admit either an $(a, b)$-hermitian or an $(a, b)$-anti-hermitian form or both; all three cases are equally possible with explicit examples. As an application we extend the result in [Bel01] on the existence for all $(a, b)$-modules $E$ associated with the Brieskorn module of a holomorphic function with an isolated singularity, of an $(a,b)$-bilinear non degenerate form on $E$. We show that with a small transformation Belgrade's form can be considered $(a, b)$-hermitian and that the result satis es the axioms of Kyoji Saito's "higher residue pairings".