Irreducibility of equisingular families of curves

In 1985 Joe Harris proved the long-standing claim of Severi that equisingular families of plane nodal curves are irreducible whenever they are nonempty. For families with more complicated singularities this is no longer true. Given a divisor on a smooth projective surface it thus makes sense to look for conditions which ensure that the family of irreducible curves in the linear system with precisely singular points of types is irreducible. Considering different surfaces, including general surfaces in and products of curves, we produce a sufficient condition of the type

where is some constant and some zero-dimensional scheme associated to the singularity type. Our results carry the same asymptotics as the best known results in this direction in the plane case, even though the coefficient is worse. For most of the surfaces considered these are the only known results in that direction.