Bridge position of 3-manifolds embedded in the 5-sphere
Geometric Topology
2026-04-15 v1
Abstract
We introduce and study bridge decompositions for 3-manifolds embedded in the 5-sphere. These generalize both the classical notion of bridge position for knots in the 3-sphere and the bridge trisections of surfaces in the 4-sphere due to Meier and Zupan. Our main technical tool is the multisections of 5-manifolds introduced by Aribi, Courte, Golla, and Moussard. We prove that every embedded 3-manifold admits such a decomposition; in particular, any such embedding is encoded by four trivial tangle diagrams. We also present a range of explicit examples, including -spun knots and ribbon 3-knots.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.12182,
title = {Bridge position of 3-manifolds embedded in the 5-sphere},
author = {Román Aranda and Sarah Blackwell and Geunyoung Kim and Patrick Naylor and Puttipong Pongtanapaisan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.12182},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
45 pages, 28 figures. Comments welcome!