English

Multisections and bridge positions in arbitrary dimensions

Geometric Topology 2026-08-01 v1

Abstract

Multisections were defined by Ben Aribi--Courte--Golla--Moussard as a way to decompose closed manifolds into 11-handlebodies, which is a generalization of Heegaard splittings and trisections. Previously, their existence was only known in dimensions up to 55. We show that multisections exist for closed manifolds in arbitrary dimensions. We also show that submanifolds of codimension at least 22 in multisected manifolds can always be put into an appropriate bridge position, generalizing the existence result on bridge trisections in dimension 44.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2608.00460,
  title  = {Multisections and bridge positions in arbitrary dimensions},
  author = {Sylvain Courte and Delphine Moussard and Qiuyu Ren and Xiaozhou Zhou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.00460},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

27 pages, 9 figures in color