Related papers: The Thurston norm via Normal Surfaces

The Thurston norm of a 3-manifold measures the complexity of surfaces representing two-dimensional homology classes. We study the possible unit balls of Thurston norms of 3-manifolds $M$ with $b_1(M) = 2$, and whose fundamental groups admit…

A theory of transversely oriented spun-normal immersed surfaces in ideally triangulated 3--manifolds is developed in this paper, including linear functionals determining the boundary curves, Euler characteristic and homology class of these…

The Thurston norm of a closed oriented graph manifold is a sum of absolute values of linear functionals, and either each or none of the top-dimensional faces of its unit ball are fibered. We show that, conversely, every norm that can be…

The Thurston norm is a seminorm on the second real homology group of a compact orientable 3-manifold. The unit ball of this norm is a convex polyhedron, whose shape's data (e.g. number of vertices, regularity) measures the complexity of the…

Thurston norms are invariants of 3-manifolds defined on their second homology vector spaces, and understanding the shape of their dual unit ball is a (widely) open problem. W. Thurston showed that every symmetric polygon in Z^2, whose…

In his influential work, Thurston introduced a norm on the second homology group of compact orientable 3-manifolds M, which by duality also determines a dual norm on the second cohomology group. A natural question, initiated by Thurston, is…

We show that a veering triangulation $\tau$ specifies a face $\sigma$ of the Thurston norm ball of a closed three-manifold, and computes the Thurston norm in the cone over $\sigma$. Further, we show that $\tau$ collates exactly the taut…

The concept of a normal surface in a triangulated, compact 3-manifold was generalised by Thurston to a spun-normal surface in a non-compact 3-manifold with ideal triangulation. This paper defines a boundary curve map which takes a…

We describe a general method to compute the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-Thurston norm for every $\mathbb{Z}_2$-homology class in an orientable Seifert manifold with orientable orbit surface. Our main tools are pseudo-horizontal surfaces. We give a…

A new lower bound on the complexity of a 3-manifold is given using the Z2-Thurston norm. This bound is shown to be sharp, and the minimal triangulations realising it are characterised using normal surfaces consisting entirely of…

For sutured 3-manifolds M, there is a sutured Thurston norm due to Scharlemann. We show how depth one foliations of M and corresponding fibrations and the usual Thurston norm on the double of M are useful tools for computing this norm. In…

Every element in the first cohomology group of a 3--manifold is dual to embedded surfaces. The Thurston norm measures the minimal `complexity' of such surfaces. For instance the Thurston norm of a knot complement determines the genus of the…

In analogy with the Thurston norm, we define for an orientable 3-manifold $M$ a numerical function on $H_2(M;Q/Z)$. This function measures the minimal complexity of folded surfaces representing a given homology class. A similar function is…

For a homotopically energy-minimizing map $u: N^3\to S^1$ on a compact, oriented $3$-manifold $N$ with boundary, we establish an identity relating the average Euler characteristic of the level sets $u^{-1}\{\theta\}$ to the scalar curvature…

We present an overview of the study of the Thurston norm, introduced by W. P. Thurston in the seminal paper "A norm for the homology of 3-manifolds" (written in 1976 and published in 1986). We first review fundamental properties of the…

In this paper we give an upper bound estimate on the dual Thurston norm of the Euler class of an arbitrary smooth foliation $\mathcal{F}$ of dimension one defined on a closed three-dimensional orientable manifold $M^3$ of negative…

Classical work of Thurston and Gabai shows that finitely many taut sutured manifold hierarchies determine the Thurston norm of a compact oriented irreducible $3$-manifold with toroidal boundary. We give an explicit procedure to extract this…

Let $M$ be a compact 3-manifold with a triangulation $\tau$. We give an inequality relating the Euler characteristic of a surface $F$ normally embedded in $M$ with the number of normal quadrilaterals in $F$. This gives a relation between a…

In this paper, we will compute the dimension of the space of spun and ordinary normal surfaces in an ideal triangulation of the interior of a compact 3-manifold with incompressible tori or Klein bottle components. Spun normal surfaces have…

We introduce a polynomial invariant $V_\tau \in \mathbb{Z}[H_1(M)/\text{torsion}]$ associated to a veering triangulation $\tau$ of a $3$-manifold $M$. In the special case where the triangulation is layered, i.e. comes from a fibration,…