Pair of pants decomposition of 4-manifolds
Abstract
Using tropical geometry, Mikhalkin has proved that every smooth complex hypersurface in decomposes into pairs of pants: a pair of pants is a real compact -manifold with cornered boundary obtained by removing an open regular neighborhood of generic hyperplanes from . As is well-known, every compact surface of genus decomposes into pairs of pants, and it is now natural to investigate this construction in dimension 4. Which smooth closed 4-manifolds decompose into pairs of pants? We address this problem here and construct many examples: we prove in particular that every finitely presented group is the fundamental group of a 4-manifold that decomposes into pairs of pants.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1503.05839,
title = {Pair of pants decomposition of 4-manifolds},
author = {Marco Golla and Bruno Martelli},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1503.05839},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
41 pages, 25 figures; exposition has been improved; the proof of Theorem 2 was incorrect, and it has been fixed. Accepted for publications in Algebr. Geom. Topol