Related papers: Representation varieties detect essential surfaces
In 1983 Culler and Shalen established a way to construct essential surfaces in a 3-manifold from ideal points of the $SL_2$-character variety associated to the 3-manifold group. We present in this article an analogous construction of…
In the seminal work of Culler and Shalen from 1983, essential surfaces in 3-manifolds are associated to ideal points of their $\text{SL}_2(\mathbb{C})$-character varieties, and connections between the algebraic geometry of the character…
Closed essential surfaces in a three-manifold can be detected by ideal points of the character variety or by algebraic non-integral representations. We give examples of closed essential surfaces not detected in either of these ways. For…
We extend Culler and Shalen's construction of detecting essential surfaces in 3-manifolds to 3-orbifolds. We do so in the setting of the $\mathrm{SL}_2(\mathbb{C})$ character variety, and following Boyer and Zhang in the…
The second author and Hara introduced the notion of an essential tribranched surface that is a generalisation of the notion of an essential embedded surface in a 3-manifold. We show that any 3-manifold for which the fundamental group has at…
The powerful character variety techniques of Culler and Shalen can be used to find essential surfaces in knot manifolds. We show that module structures on the coordinate ring of the character variety can be used to identify detected…
The existence of essential closed surfaces surfaces is proven for finite coverings of 3-manifolds that are triangulated by finitely many topological ideal tetrahedra and admit a regular, negatively curved, ideal structure.
We consider the natural problem of counting isotopy classes of essential surfaces in 3-manifolds, focusing on closed essential surfaces in a broad class of hyperbolic 3-manifolds. Our main result is that the count of (possibly disconnected)…
We give a simple sufficient condition for a spun-normal surface in an ideal triangulation to be incompressible, namely that it is a vertex surface with non-empty boundary which has a quadrilateral in each tetrahedron. While this condition…
Culler and Shalen, and later Yoshida, give ways to construct incompressible surfaces in 3-manifolds from ideal points of the character and deformation varieties, respectively. We work in the case of hyperbolic punctured torus bundles, for…
In this paper, we use normal surface theory to study Dehn filling on a knot-manifold. First, it is shown that there is a finite computable set of slopes on the boundary of a knot-manifold that bound normal and almost normal surfaces in a…
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 sl_2-triples play a fundamental role for the structure theory of Lie algebras, and representation theory in general. Here we investigate sl_2-triples of global vector fields on schemes X in positive characteristics p>0, and develop a…
We present a simple proof of the surface classification theorem using normal curves. This proof is analogous to Kneser's and Milnor's proof of the existence and uniqueness of the prime decomposition of 3-manifolds. In particular, we do not…
Infinite families of 3-dimensional closed graph manifolds and closed Seifert fibered spaces are exhibited, each member of which contains an essential torus not detected by ideal points of the variety of $\text{SL}_2(\mathbb{F})$-characters…
A canonical branched covering over each sufficiently good simplicial complex is constructed. Its structure depends on the combinatorial type of the complex. In this way, each closed orientable 3-manifold arises as a branched covering over…
A new class of compact K\"ahler manifolds, called special, is defined, which are the ones having no surjective meromorphic map to an orbifold of general type. The special manifolds are in many respect higher-dimensional generalisations of…
We prove results showing that the existence of essential maps of surfaces in a manifold M' obtained from a 3-manifold M by Dehn filling implies the existence of essential maps of surfaces in M.
We define a laminar branched surface to be a branched surface satisfying the following conditions: (1) Its horizontal boundary is incompressible; (2) there is no monogon; (3) there is no Reeb component; (4) there is no sink disk (after…
The disk complex of a surface in a 3-manifold is used to define its {\it topological index}. Surfaces with well-defined topological index are shown to generalize well-known classes, such as incompressible, strongly irreducible, and critical…