Related papers: Arc complexes, sphere complexes and Goeritz groups

Haken showed that the Heegaard splittings of reducible 3-manifolds are reducible, that is, a reducing 2-sphere can be found which intersects the Heegaard surface in a single simple closed curve. When the genus of the "interesting" surface…

The Powell Conjecture offers a finite generating set for the genus $g$ Goeritz group, the group of automorphisms of $S^3$ that preserve a genus $g$ Heegaard surface $\Sigma_g$, generalizing a classical result of Goeritz in the case $g=2$.…

It is known that there are surface bundles of arbitrarily high genus which have genus two Heegaard splittings. The simplest examples are Seifert fibered spaces with the sphere as a base space, three exceptional fibers and which allow…

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 $g \ge 2$ and assume that we are given a genus $g$ Heegaard splitting of a closed orientable $3$-manifold with the distance greater than $2g+2$. We prove that the mapping class group of the once-stabilization of such a Heegaard…

For a genus two Heegaard splitting of a lens space, the primitive disk complex is defined to be the full subcomplex of the disk complex for one of the handlebodies of the splitting spanned by all vertices of primitive disks. In this work,…

We give two criteria for diagrams of Heegaard splittings of 3-manifolds. Weaker one of them guarantees that the splitting is strongly irreducible, and the stronger one guarantees in addition that the Goeritz group is finite. They are…

We construct a sequence of pairs of 3-manifolds each with torus boundary and with the following two properties: 1) For the result of a carefully chosen glueing of the nth pair of 3-manifolds along their boundary tori, the ratio of the genus…

Every surface bundle with genus $g$ fiber has a canonical Heegaard splitting of genus $2g+1$. We classify the mapping class groups of such Heegaard splittings in the case when the surface bundle has a sufficiently complicated monodromy map.

We show that if $M$ is a fibered, orientable 3-manifold, and if $\pi_1 M$ has 1-relator presentation, then the presentation is induced by a Heegaard splitting of $M$. A corollary is that, for these manifolds, the rank of $\pi_1 M$ is equal…

A Heegaard splitting which admits a unique pair of disjoint compression disks on distinct sides is said to be keen weakly reducible. This paper provides an construction of keen weakly reducible Heegaard splittings of arbitrary genus except…

A gap in a paper of Rubinstein-Scharlemann is explored: new examples are found of closed orientable 3-manifolds with possibly multiple genus 2 Heegaard splittings. Properties common to all the examples in the original paper are not…

Suppose M is a compact orientable irreducible 3-manifold with Heegaard splitting surfaces P and Q. Then either Q is isotopic to a possibly stabilized copy of P or the Hempel distance of the splitting P is no greater than twice the genus of…

When a 3-manifold admits an openbook decomposition, we get a Heegaard splitting by thickening a page. This splitting surface has a special multi curves coming from the binding. In this paper, we consider the subgroup of the Goeritz group of…

Let M_1 and M_2 be compact, orientable 3-manifolds, and M the manifold obtained by gluing some component F of \bdy M_1 to some component of \bdy M_2 by a homeomorphism \phi. We show that when \phi is "sufficiently complicated" then (1) the…

For a boundary-reducible $3$-manifold $M$ with $\partial M$ a genus $g$ surface, we show that if $M$ admits a genus $g+1$ Heegaard surface $S$, then the disk complex of $S$ is simply connected. Also we consider the connectedness of the…

Given a Heegaard splitting of the $3$-sphere, the primitive disk complex is defined to be the full subcomplex of the disk complex for one of the handlebodies of the splitting. It is an open question whether the primitive disk complex is…

An $S$-ring (a Schur ring) is said to be separable with respect to a class of groups $\mathcal{K}$ if every its algebraic isomorphism to an $S$-ring over a group from $\mathcal{K}$ is induced by a combinatorial isomorphism. We prove that…

In a previous paper we introduced a notion of "genericity" for countable sets of curves in the curve complex of a surface S, based on the Lebesgue measure on the space of projective measured laminations in S. With this definition we prove…

We show that the group of homeomorphisms of a compact contractible $d$-manifold which fix the boundary is contractible, as long as $d \geq 6$. We deduce this from a strong uniqueness statement for one-sided $h$-cobordisms.