Lefschetz fibrations on compact Stein surfaces

The existence of a positive allowable Lefschetz fibration on a compact Stein surface with boundary was established by Loi and Piergallini by using branched covering techniques. Here we give an alternative simple proof of this fact and construct explicitly the vanishing cycles of the Lefschetz fibration, obtaining a direct identification of the set of compact Stein manifolds with positive allowable Lefschetz fibrations over a 2-disk. In the process we associate to every compact Stein manifold infinitely many nonequivalent such Lefschetz fibrations.