Related papers: Trisecting 4-manifolds

Given a handle decomposition of a 4-manifold with boundary, and an open book decomposition of the boundary, we show how to produce a trisection diagram of a trisection of the 4-manifold inducing the given open book. We do this by making the…

We prove that every smoothly embedded surface in a 4--manifold can be isotoped to be in bridge position with respect to a given trisection of the ambient 4--manifold; that is, after isotopy, the surface meets components of the trisection in…

We show that the only closed 4-manifolds admitting genus two trisections are $S^2 \times S^2$ and connected sums of $S^1 \times S^3$, $\mathbb{CP}^2$, and $\overline{\mathbb{CP}}^2$ with two summands. Moreover, each of these manifolds…

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…

A multisection, or $n$-section, of an $(n + 1)$-dimensional manifold is a decomposition of this manifold into $n$ $1$-handlebodies of dimension $n+1$, such that all these handlebodies intersect along a closed surface, and every…

Given a diagram for a trisection of a 4-manifold $X$, we describe the homology and the intersection form of $X$ in terms of the three subgroups of $H_1(\Sigma;\mathbb{Z})$ generated by the three sets of curves and the intersection pairing…

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…

We introduce the concept of pseudo-trisections of smooth oriented compact 4-manifolds with boundary. The main feature of pseudo-trisections is that they have lower complexity than relative trisections for given 4-manifolds. We prove…

Let $S$ be a $P^2$-knot which is the connected sum of a 2-knot with normal Euler number 0 and an unknotted $P^2$-knot with normal Euler number $\pm2$ in a closed 4-manifold $X$ with trisection $T_{X}$. Then, we show that the trisection of…

We show that manifolds admitting special generic maps also admit nice generalized multisections. Special generic maps are natural generalized versions of Morse functions with exactly two singular points on closed manifolds, characterizing…

Previously work of the author with Meier and Starkston showed that every closed symplectic manifold $(X,\omega)$ with a rational symplectic form admits a trisection compatible with the symplectic topology. In this paper, we describe the…

A Heegaard diagram for a 3-manifold is regarded as a pair of simplexes in the complex of curves on a surface and a Heegaard splitting as a pair of subcomplexes generated by the equivalent diagrams. We relate geometric and combinatorial…

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…

The spine of a trisected 4-manifold is a singular 3-dimensional set from which the trisection itself can be reconstructed. 3-manifolds embedded in the trisected 4--manifold can often be isotoped to lie almost or entirely in the spine of the…

A simplified trisection is a trisection map on a 4-manifold such that, in its critical value set, there is no double point and cusps only appear in triples on innermost fold circles. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for a…

We note that infinitely many irreducible, closed, simply connected 4-manifolds, with prescribed signature and spin type, admit perfect Morse functions, i.e. they can be given handle decompositions without 1- and 3-handles. In particular,…

These notes summarize and expand on a mini-course given at CIRM in February 2018 as part of Winter Braids VIII. We somewhat obsessively develop the slogan `Trisections are to 4-manifolds as Heegaard splittings are to 3-manifolds', focusing…

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…

We study trisections of smooth, compact non-orientable 4-manifolds, and introduce trisections of non-orientable 4-manifolds with boundary. In particular, we prove a non-orientable analogue of a classical theorem of Laudenbach-Po\'enaru. As…

We define a Heegaard-Scharlemann-Thompson (HST) splitting of a 3-manifold M to be a sequence of pairwise-disjoint, embedded surfaces, {F_i}, such that for each odd value of i, F_i is a Heegaard splitting of the submanifold of M cobounded by…