Related papers: Rectangle condition for compression body and 2-fol…

The rectangle condition for a genus $g$ Heegaard splitting of a 3-manifold, defined by Casson and Gordon, provides a sufficient criterion for the Heegaard splitting to be strongly irreducible. However it is unknown whether there exists a…

We extend the notion of thin multiple Heegaard splittings of a link in a 3-manifold to take into consideration not only compressing disks but also cut-disks for the Heegaard surfaces. We prove that if H is a c-strongly compressible bridge…

When a Dehn filled link manifold contains a geometrically incompressible one-sided surface, it is shown there is a unique boundary incompressible position that the surface can take in the link space. The proof uses a version of the…

In this paper, we define the rectangle condition on the bridge sphere for a $n$-bridge decomposition of a knot whose definition is analogous to the definition of the rectangle condition for Heegaard splittings of $3$-manifolds. We show that…

A Heegaard splitting of an open 3-manifold is the partition of the manifold into two non-compact handlebodies which intersect on their common boundary. This paper proves several non-compact analogues of theorems about compact Heegaard…

Casson and Gordon gave the rectangle condition for strong irreducibility of Heegaard splittings [1]. We give a parity condition for irreducibility of Heegaard splittings of irreducible manifolds. As an application, we give examples of…

Colding and Gabai have given an effective version of Li's theorem that non-Haken hyperbolic 3-manifolds have finitely many irreducible Heegaard splittings. As a corollary of their work, we show that Haken hyperbolic 3-manifolds have a…

The main theorem of this article provides sufficient conditions for a degree $d$ finite cover $M'$ of a hyperbolic 3-manifold $M$ to be a surface-bundle. Let $F$ be an embedded, closed and orientable surface of genus $g$, close to a minimal…

We show that if two 3-manifolds with toroidal boundary are glued via a `sufficiently complicated' map then every Heegaard splitting of the resulting 3-manifold is weakly reducible. Additionally, if Z is a manifold obtained by gluing X and…

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…

Non-isotopic Heegaard splittings of non-minimal genus were known previously only for very special 3-manifolds. We show in this paper that they are in fact a wide spread phenomenon in 3-manifold theory: We exhibit a large class of knots and…

Suppose that a three-manifold M contains infinitely many distinct strongly irreducible Heegaard splittings H + nK, obtained by Haken summing the surface H with n copies of the surface K. We show that K is incompressible. All known examples,…

We use thin position of Heegaard splittings to give a new proof of Haken's Lemma that a Heegaard surface of a reducible manifold is reducible and of Scharlemann's ``Strong Haken Theorem'': a Heegaard surface for a 3-manifold may be isotoped…

Let M be a compressionbody containing a graph T (with at least one edge) such that \boundary_+ M is parallel to the union of T and \boundary_- M. We extend methods of Hayashi and Shimokawa to classify bridge surfaces for T. The results of…

We consider closed acylindrical surfaces in 3-manifolds and in knot and link complements, and show that the genus of these surfaces is bounded linearly by the number of tetrahedra in the triangulation of the manifold and by the number of…

In this paper we show that for a given 3-manifold and a given Heegaard splitting there are finitely many preferred decomposing systems of $3g - 3$ disjoint essential disks. These are characterized by a combinatorial criterion which is a…

Let K be a knot in a closed orientable irreducible 3-manifold M and let P be a Heegaard splitting of the knot complement of genus at least two. Suppose Q is a bridge surface for K. Then either \begin{itemize} \item $d(P)\leq 2-\chi(Q-K)$,…

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…

In the closed, non-Haken, hyperbolic class of examples generated by (2p,q) Dehn fillings of Figure 8 knot space, the geometrically incompressible one-sided surfaces are identified by the filling ratio p/q and determined to be unique in all…

A famous example of Casson and Gordon shows that a Haken 3-manifold can have an infinite family of irreducible Heegaard splittings with different genera. In this paper, we prove that a closed non-Haken 3-manifold has only finitely many…