Related papers: Examples of unstabilized critical Heegaard surface…

In this paper we introduce "critical surfaces", which are described via a 1-complex whose definition is reminiscent of the curve complex. Our main result is that if the minimal genus common stabilization of a pair of strongly irreducible…

Let $M$ be a compact orientable irreducible 3-manifold and $H$ be an unstabilized genus three Heegaard splitting of $M$. In this article, we will define a simplicial complex of weak reducing pairs for $H$ and find several properties of this…

Let M be a totally orientable graph manifold with characteristic submanifold T and let M = V cup_S W be a Heegaard splitting. We prove that S is standard. In particular, S is the amalgamation of strongly irreducible Heegaard splittings. The…

Let $(M,g)$ be a closed oriented Riemannian $3$-manifold and suppose that there is a strongly irreducible Heegaard splitting $H$. We prove that $H$ is either isotopic to a minimal surface of index at most one or isotopic to the stable…

Critical surfaces are defined by Bachman as topological index 2 surfaces, generalizing incompressible surfaces and strongly irreducible surfaces. In this paper we give a condition to obtain critical Heegaard surfaces by amalgamation. As a…

We consider a Heegaard splitting M=H_1 \cup_S H_2 of a 3-manifold M having an essential disk D in H_1 and an essential surface F in H_2 with |D \cap F|=1. (We require that boundary of F is in S when H_2 is a compressionbody with non-empty…

For each g greater than one there is a 3-manifold with two genus g Heegaard splittings that require g stabilizations to become equivalent. Previously known examples required at most one stabilization. Control of families of Heegaard…

A weak reducing pair in a Heegaard splitting M = V \cup_S W is a pair of disjoint essential disks D \in V and E \in W. The weakly reducible Heegaard splitting contains at least one weak reducing pair. Critical Heegaard splitting is a…

Let M_1 and M_2 be closed, orientable 3-manifolds. Let H_i denote a Heegaard surface in M_i. We prove that if H_1 # H_2 comes from stabilizing a lower genus splitting of M_1 # M_2 then either H_1 or H_2 comes from stabilizing a lower genus…

Let (V,W;F) be a weakly reducible, unstabilized, genus three Heegaard splitting in an orientable, irreducible 3-manifold M. In this article, we prove that either the disk complex D(F) is contractible or F is critical. Hence, the topological…

We construct families of pairs of Heegaard splittings that must be stabilized several times to become equivalent. The first such pair differs only by their orientation. These are genus n splittings of a closed 3-manifold that must be…

We show that the number of genus $g$ embedded minimal surfaces in $\mathbb{S}^3$ tends to infinity as $g\rightarrow\infty$. The surfaces we construct resemble doublings of the Clifford torus with curvature blowing up along torus knots as…

We show that sub-surfaces of a Heegaard surface for which the relative Hempel distance of the splitting is sufficiently high have to appear in any Heegaard surface of genus bounded by half that distance.

We construct families of manifolds that have pairs of genus $g$ Heegaard splittings that must be stabilized roughly $g$ times to become equivalent. We also show that when two unstabilized, boundary-unstabilized Heegaard splittings are…

We address a special case of the Stabilization Problem for Heegaard splittings, establishing an upper bound on the number of stabilizations required to make a Heegaard splitting of a Haken 3-manifold isotopic to an amalgamation along an…

This paper contains the motivation for the study of critical surfaces. In previous work the only justification given for the definition of this new class of surfaces is the strength of the results. However, when viewed as the topological…

In this paper it is shown that manifolds admitting minimal genus weakly reducible but irreducible Heegaard splittings contain an essential surface. This is an extension of a well known theorem of Casson-Gordon to manifolds with non-empty…

We define a notion of Hempel distance for one-sided Heegaard splittings and show that the existence of alternate surfaces restricts distance for one-sided splittings in a manner similar to Hartshorn's and Scharlemann-Tomova's results for…

We prove that for generic metrics on a 3-sphere, the minimal surface obtained from the min-max procedure of Simon-Smith has index 1. We prove an analogous result for minimal surfaces arising from strongly irreducible Heegaard sweepouts in…

For a knot $K\subset S^3$, its exterior $E(K) = S^3\backslash\eta(K)$ has a singular foliation by Seifert surfaces of $K$ derived from a circle-valued Morse function $f\colon E(K)\to S^1$. When $f$ is self-indexing and has no critical…