Related papers: On converting a side-pairing to a handle decomposi…

This paper describes a way to subdivide a 3-manifold into angled blocks, namely polyhedral pieces that need not be simply connected. When the individual blocks carry dihedral angles that fit together in a consistent fashion, we prove that a…

We review Giroux's contact handles and contact handle attachments in dimension three and show that a bypass attachment consists of a pair of contact 1 and 2-handles. As an application we describe explicit contact handle decompositions of…

This paper gives a proof that the fundamental group of a class of closed orientable 3-manifolds constructed from three injective handlebodies has a solvable word problem. This is done by giving an algorithm to decide if a closed curve in…

We construct a hyperbolic 3-manifold $M$ (with $\partial M$ totally geodesic) which contains no essential closed surfaces, but for any even integer $g> 0$ there are infinitely many separating slopes $r$ on $\partial M$ so that $M[r]$, the…

A closed connected hyperbolic $n$-manifold bounds geometrically if it is isometric to the geodesic boundary of a compact hyperbolic $(n+1)$-manifold. A. Reid and D. Long have shown by arithmetic methods the existence of infinitely many…

Harer, Kas and Kirby have conjectured that every handle decomposition of the elliptic surface $E(1)_{2,3}$ requires both 1- and 3-handles. In this article, we construct a smooth 4-manifold which has the same Seiberg-Witten invariant as…

In a variety of settings we provide a method for decomposing a 3-manifold $M$ into pieces. When the pieces have the appropriate type of hyperbolicity, then the manifold $M$ is hyperbolic and its volume is bounded below by the sum of the…

We give a combinatorial description of the Legendrian contact homology algebra associated to a Legendrian link in $S^1\times S^2$ or any connected sum $\#^k(S^1\times S^2)$, viewed as the contact boundary of the Weinstein manifold obtained…

This paper presents, with explanatory details, the handle decompositions, fundamental groups and homology groups of 3-manifolds, including some knot complements. Hence, along this paper, when the word manifold appears it is implicit that…

We establish a bijective correspondence between the set T(n) of 3-dimensional triangulations with n tetrahedra and a certain class H(n) of relative handlebodies (i.e. handlebodies with boundary loops, as defined by Johannson) of genus n+1.…

We study complete $3$-manifolds with nonnegative scalar curvature under additional regularity assumptions. We prove that a contractible such manifold is diffeomorphic to $\mathbb{R}^3$, and that an open handlebody admitting such a metric…

We show that, given $d \geq 4$ and two closed connected oriented PL $4$-manifolds $M$ and $N$ such that $N$ has a handle decomposition with no $1$- and $3$-handles, there exists a $d$-fold simple branched covering $p \colon M \darrow{d} N$…

A Hamiltonian decomposition of a regular graph is a partition of its edge set into Hamiltonian cycles. The problem of finding edge-disjoint Hamiltonian cycles in a given regular graph has many applications in combinatorial optimization and…

In this article, we demonstrate that for any positive integer $n$, the knot surgery $4$-manifold $E(n)_K$ has a handle decomposition without $1$- and $3$-handles. Here, $K$ represents either a fibered two-bridge knot $C(2\epsilon_1,…

Harer-Kas-Kirby conjectured that every handle decomposition of the elliptic surface E(1)_{2,3} requires both 1- and 3-handles. We prove that the elliptic surface E(n)_{p,q} has a handle decomposition without 1-handles for $n\geq 1$ and…

The classical Seifert algorithm provides an explicit construction of a Seifert surface for any link in $S^3$. Alegria and Menasco extended this construction to integral homology $3$-spheres using Heegaard splittings. In this paper, we…

We establish the method of holomorphic handle attaching to the strongly pseudoconcave boundary of a complex surface. We use this for proving the following statements: (1) every closed connected oriented contact 3-manifold can be filled as…

We present an approach to constructing broken Lefschetz fibrations (BLFs) $f:X\rightarrow S^2$ from a handle decomposition of a 4-manifold $X$. Given a handle decomposition as input these techniques yield explicit descriptions of the BLFs,…

Suppose $k$ is a positive integer and $\mathcal{X}$ is a $k$-fold packing of the plane by infinitely many arc-connected compact sets, which means that every point of the plane belongs to at most $k$ sets. Suppose there is a function…

In this paper, we consider decompositions of closed orientable 3-manifolds with more than 3 handlebodies, where the union of intersections of handlebodies is a multibranched surface. We define stabilization operations for such…