On the homology of the noncrossing partition lattice and the Milnor fibre

Abstract

Let L be the noncrossing partition lattice associated to a finite Coxeter group W. In this paper we construct explicit bases for the top homology groups of intervals and rank-selected subposets of L. We define a multiplicative structure on the Whitney homology of L in terms of the basis, and the resulting algebra has similarities to the Orlik-Solomon algebra. As an application, we obtain four chain complexes which compute the integral homology of the Milnor fibre of the reflection arrangement of W, the Milnor fibre of the discriminant of W, the hyperplane complement of W and the Artin group of type W, respectively. We also tabulate some computational results on the integral homology of the Milnor fibres.