Related papers: Handlebody argument for modifying achiral Lefschet…

We show how to construct broken, achiral Lefschetz fibrations on arbitrary smooth, closed, oriented 4-manifolds. These are generalizations of Lefschetz fibrations over the 2-sphere, where we allow Lefschetz singularities with the…

We prove that every closed oriented smooth 4-manifold X admits a broken Lefschetz fibration (aka singular Lefschetz fibration) over the 2-sphere. Given any closed orientable surface F of square zero in X, we can choose the fibration so that…

Motivated by the programmes initiated by Taubes and Perutz, we study the geometry of near-symplectic 4-manifolds, i.e., manifolds equipped with a closed 2-form which is symplectic outside a union of embedded 1-dimensional submanifolds, and…

The topology of broken Lefschetz fibrations is studied by means of handle decompositions. We consider a slight generalization of round handles, and describe the handle diagrams for all that appear in dimension four. We establish simplified…

We present several structural results on closed, nonorientable, smooth $4$--manifolds, extending analogous results and machinery for the orientable case. We prove the existence of simplified broken Lefschetz fibrations and simplified…

It is known that an arbitrary smooth, oriented 4-manifold admits the structure of what is called a broken Lefschetz fibration. Given a broken fibration, there are certain modifications, realized as homotopies of the fibration map, that…

In this paper, we prove Lefschetz fibration embeddings of achiral as well as simplified broken (achiral) Lefschetz fibrations of compact, connected, orientable $4$-manifolds over $D^2$ into the trivial Lefschetz fibration of $\mathbb…

The purpose of this note is to explain a combinatorial description of closed smooth oriented 4-manifolds in terms of positive Dehn twist factorizations of surface mapping classes, and further explore these connections. This is obtained via…

We show that any 4-manifold, after surgery on a curve, admits an achiral Lefschetz fibration. In particular, we show that the connected sum of any simply connected 4-manifold with a 2-sphere bundle over the 2-sphere will admit an achiral…

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,…

We present explicit algorithms for simplifying the topology of indefinite fibrations on 4-manifolds, which include broken Lefschetz fibrations and indefinite Morse 2-functions. The algorithms consist of sequences of moves, which modify…

Round handles are affiliated with smooth 4-manifolds in two major ways: 5-dimensional round handles appear extensively as the building blocks in cobordisms between 4-manifolds, whereas 4-dimensional round handles are the building blocks of…

The broken genera are orientation preserving diffeomorphism invariants of closed oriented 4-manifolds, defined via broken Lefschetz fibrations. We study the properties of the broken genera invariants, and calculate them for various…

Let $W$ be a nonorientable $4$-dimensional handlebody without $3$- and $4$-handles. We show that $W$ admits a Lefschetz fibration over the $2$-disk, whose regular fiber is a nonorientable surface with nonempty boundary. This is an analogue…

Singular fibrations generalize achiral Lefschetz fibrations of 4-manifolds over surfaces while sharing some of their properties. For instance, relatively minimal singular fibrations are determined by their monodromy. We explain how to…

We discuss $4$-dimensional achiral Lefschetz fibrations bounding $3$-dimensional open books and study their Lefschetz fibration (LF) embedding in a bounded $6$-dimensional manifold, in the sense of Ghanwat--Pancholi. As an application we…

Much work has been done on the existence and uniqueness of broken Lefschetz fibrations such as those by Auroux et al., Gay and Kirby, Lekili, Akbulut and Karakurt, Baykur, and Williams, but there has been a lack of explicit examples. A…

We introduce hyperelliptic simplified (more generally, directed) broken Lefschetz fibrations, which is a generalization of hyperelliptic Lefschetz fibrations. We construct involutions on the total spaces of such fibrations of genus $g\geq…

Here we show that every compact smooth 4-manifold X has a structure of a Broken Lefschetz Fibration (BLF in short). Furthermore, if b_{2}^{+}(X)> 0 then it also has a Broken Lefschetz Pencil structure (BLP) with nonempty base locus. This…

This paper is the second part of our work on 4-dimensional 2-handlebodies. In the first part (arXiv:math.GT/0407032) it is shown that up to certain set of local moves, connected simple coverings of B^4 branched over ribbon surfaces,…