Related papers: PL 4-manifolds admitting simple crystallizations: …
The present paper is devoted to present a unifying survey about some special classes of crystallizations of compact PL $4$-manifolds with empty or connected boundary, called {\it semi-simple} and {\it weak semi-simple crystallizations},…
Within crystallization theory, two interesting PL invariants for $d$-manifolds have been introduced and studied, namely {\it gem-complexity} and {\it regular genus}. In the present paper we prove that, for any closed connected PL…
For $d\geq 2$, the regular genus of a closed connected PL $d$-manifold $M$ is the least genus (resp., half of the genus) of an orientable (resp., a non-orientable) surface into which a crystallization of $M$ imbeds regularly. The regular…
In this article, we study a class of closed connected orientable PL $4$-manifolds admitting a semi-simple crystallization and which have an infinite cyclic fundamental group. We show that the manifold in the class admits a handle…
Minimal crystallizations of simply connected PL 4-manifolds are very natural objects. Many of their topological features are reflected in their combinatorial structure which, in addition, is preserved under the connected sum operation. We…
In this paper we study colored triangulations of compact PL 4-manifolds with empty or connected boundary which induce handle decompositions lacking in 1-handles or in 1- and 3-handles, thus facing also the problem, posed by Kirby, of the…
Let $M$ be a connected compact PL 4-manifold with boundary. In this article, we have given several lower bounds for regular genus and gem-complexity of the manifold $M$. In particular, we have proved that if $M$ is a connected compact…
The idea of studying trisections of closed smooth $4$-manifolds via (singular) triangulations, endowed with a suitable vertex-labelling by three colors, is due to Bell, Hass, Rubinstein and Tillmann, and has been applied by Spreer and…
In this article, we introduce two new PL-invariants: weighted regular genus and weighted G-degree for manifolds with boundary. We first prove two inequalities involving some PL-invariants which state that for any PL-manifold $M$ with non…
It is well-known that in dimension 4 any framed link $(L,c)$ uniquely represents the PL 4-manifold $M^4(L,c)$ obtained from $\mathbb D^4$ by adding 2-handles along $(L,c)$. Moreover, if trivial dotted components are also allowed (i.e. in…
A crystallization of a PL manifold is an edge-colored graph that corresponds to a contracted triangulation of the manifold, facilitating the study of its topological and combinatorial properties. A small cover over a simple convex…
In this article, we construct a crystallization of the mapping torus of some (PL) homeomorphisms $f:M \to M$ for a certain class of PL-manifolds $M$. These yield upper bounds for gem-complexity and regular genus of a large class of…
We describe an algorithm to subdivide automatically a given set of PL n-manifolds (via coloured triangulations or, equivalently, via crystallizations) into classes whose elements are PL-homeomorphic. The algorithm, implemented in the case…
A crystallization of a PL manifold is an edge-colored graph encoding a contracted triangulation of the manifold. The concept of regular genus generalizes the notions of surface genus and Heegaard genus for 3-manifolds to higher-dimensional…
(d+1)-colored graphs, i.e. edge-colored graphs that are (d+1)-regular, have already been proved to be a useful representation tool for compact PL d-manifolds, thus extending the theory (known as crystallization theory) originally developed…
Let $(\Gamma,\gamma)$ be a crystallization of connected compact 3-manifold $M$ with $h$ boundary components. Let $\mathcal{G}(M)$ and $\mathit k (M)$ be the regular genus and gem-complexity of $M$ respectively, and let $\mathcal{G}(\partial…
Gems are a particular type of edge-colored graphs, dual to colored triangulations, which represent compact PL-manifolds of arbitrary dimension, both in the closed and boundary case. In the present paper, gem theory is used to approach…
We show that, given $d \geq 4$ and two closed connected oriented PL $4$-manifolds $M$ and $N$ such that $N$ has a handle decomposition with no $1$- and $3$-handles, there exists a $d$-fold simple branched covering $p \colon M \darrow{d} N$…
This article focuses on a class of properly edge-colored graphs, which arise from topological combinatorics, and investigates their embeddings onto surfaces. Specifically, these graphs are known as the dual graphs of balanced normal…
We review the main achievements regarding the interactions between gem theory (which makes use of edge-colored graphs to represent PL-manifolds of arbitrary dimension) and both the classical representation of PL 4-manifolds via Kirby…