Noninjectivity of the monodromy of certain equicritical strata

Abstract An equicritical stratum is the locus of univariate monic squarefree complex polynomials where the critical points have prescribed multiplicities. Tracking the positions of both roots and critical points, there is a natural “monodromy map” taking the fundamental group into a braid group. We show here that when there are exactly two critical points, this monodromy map is noninjective.