A computational approach to Milnor fiber cohomology

In this note we consider the Milnor fiber $F$ associated to a reduced projective plane curve $C$. A computational approach for the determination of the characteristic polynomial of the monodromy action on the first cohomology group of $F$, also known as the Alexander polynomial of the curve $C$, is presented. This leads to an effective algorithm to detect all the monodromy eigenvalues and, in many cases, explicit bases for the monodromy eigenspaces in terms of polynomial differential forms.