Related papers: The Thurston norm via Normal Surfaces

We give a brief summary of some of our work and our joint work with Stephan Tillmann on solving Thurston's equation and Haken equation on triangulated 3-manifolds in this paper. Several conjectures on the existence of solutions to…

This is the second in a series of papers in which we investigate ideal triangulations of the interiors of compact 3-manifolds with tori or Klein bottle boundaries. Such triangulations have been used with great effect, following the…

We exhibit a closed hyperbolic 3-manifold which satisfies a very strong form of Thurston's Virtual Fibration Conjecture. In particular, this manifold has finite covers which fiber over the circle in arbitrarily many ways. More precisely, it…

We propose a finite dimensional variational principle on triangulated 3-manifolds so that its critical points are related to solutions to Thurston's gluing equation and Haken's normal surface equation. The action functional is the volume.…

Using recent results of Agol, Przytycki-Wise and Wise we show that twisted Alexander polynomials detect the Thurston norm of any irreducible 3-manifold which is not a closed graph manifold.

We establish a new homological lower bound for the Thurston norm on 1-cohomology of 3-manifolds. This generalizes previous results of C. McMullen, S. Harvey, and the author. We also establish an analogous lower bound for 1-cohomology of…

Thurston conjectured that a closed triangulated 3-manifold in which every edge has degree 5 or 6, and no two edges of degree 5 lie in a common 2-cell, has word-hyperbolic fundamental group. We establish Thurston's conjecture by proving that…

We assign to a finite $CW$-complex and an element in its first cohomology group a twisted version of the $L^2$-Euler characteristic and study its main properties. In the case of an irreducible orientable $3$-manifold with empty or toroidal…

For a 3-manifold M, McMullen derived from the Alexander polynomial of M a norm on H^1(M, R) called the Alexander norm. He showed that the Thurston norm on H^1(M, R), which measures the complexity of a dual surface, is an upper bound for the…

Normal surface theory, a tool to represent surfaces in a triangulated 3-manifold combinatorially, is ubiquitous in computational 3-manifold theory. In this paper, we investigate a relaxed notion of normal surfaces where we remove the…

Let M be the interior of a compact 3-manifold with non-empty boundary, and T be an ideal (topological) triangulation of M. This paper describes necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of angle structures, semi-angle structures…

A tiling of the sphere by triangles, squares, or hexagons is convex if every vertex has at most 6, 4, or 3 polygons adjacent to it, respectively. Assigning an appropriate weight to any tiling, our main result is explicit formulas for the…

We study incompressible surfaces constructed by Culler-Shalen theory in the context of twisted Alexander polynomials. For a $1$st cohomology class of a $3$-manifold the coefficients of twisted Alexander polynomials induce regular functions…

Thurston's triangulation conjecture asserts that every hyperbolic 3-manifold admits a geometric triangulation into hyper-ideal hyperbolic tetrahedra. So far, this conjecture had only been proven for a few special 3-manifolds. In this…

We define a torsion invariant T for every balanced sutured manifold (M,g), and show that it agrees with the Euler characteristic of sutured Floer homology SFH. The invariant T is easily computed using Fox calculus. With the help of T, we…

Suppose M is a cusped finite-volume hyperbolic 3-manifold and T is an ideal triangulation of M with essential edges. We show that any incompressible surface S in M that is not a virtual fiber can be isotoped into spunnormal form in T . The…

A well-known result of Walsh states that if $\mathcal T^*$ is an ideal triangulation of an atoroidal, acylindrical, irreducible, compact 3-manifold with torus boundary components, then every properly embedded, two-sided, incompressible…

We investigate the complexity of finding an embedded non-orientable surface of Euler genus $g$ in a triangulated $3$-manifold. This problem occurs both as a natural question in low-dimensional topology, and as a first non-trivial instance…

We define a norm on the homology of a foliated manifold, which refines and majorizes the usual Gromov norm on homology. This norm depends in an upper semi-continuous way on the underlying foliation, in the geometric topology, and can…

For $\Gamma_1$-structures on 3-manifolds, we give a very simple proof of Thurston's regularization theorem, first proved in \cite{thurston}, without using Mather's homology equivalence. Moreover, in the co-orientable case, the resulting…