Related papers: Diagrams for Relative Trisections

In this article, we classify (non-compact) $3$-manifolds with uniformly positive scalar curvature. Precisely, we show that an oriented $3$-manifold has a complete metric with uniformly positive scalar curvature if and only if it is…

We give several criteria on a closed, oriented 3-manifold that will imply that it is the boundary of a (simply connected) 4-manifold that admits infinitely many distinct smooth structures. We also show that any weakly fillable contact…

We present new explicit decompositions of manifolds via so-called fold maps into lower dimensional spaces. Fold maps form a nice class of so-called generic maps, generalizing Morse functions naturally. To understand the topologies and the…

Trisections of closed 4-manifolds, first defined and studied by Gay and Kirby, have proved to be a useful tool in the systematic analysis of 4-manifolds via handlebodies. Subsequent work of Abrams, Gay, and Kirby established a connection…

The face pairing graph of a 3-manifold triangulation is a 4-valent graph denoting which tetrahedron faces are identified with which others. We present a series of properties that must be satisfied by the face pairing graph of a closed…

We show that two properly embedded compact surfaces in an orientable 4-manifold are cobordant if and only if they are $\mathbb{Z}/2$-homologous and either the 4-manifold has boundary or the surfaces have the same normal Euler number. If the…

We describe a correspondence between Turaev surfaces of link diagrams on $S^2\subset S^3$ and special Heegaard diagrams for $S^3$ adapted to links.

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…

Gay and Kirby introduced the notion of a trisection of a smooth 4-manifold, which is a decomposition of the 4-manifold into three elementary pieces. Rubinstein and Tillmann later extended this idea to construct multisections of…

This paper gives sharp linear bounds on the genus of a normal surface in a triangulated compact, orientable 3--manifold in terms of the quadrilaterals in its cell decomposition---different bounds arise from varying hypotheses on the surface…

We investigate slicings of combinatorial manifolds as properly embedded co-dimension 1 submanifolds. A focus is given to dimension 3 where slicings are normal surfaces. In the case of 2-neighborly 3-manifolds and quadrangulated slicings, a…

Given a smooth, compact four-manifold $X$ viewed as a cobordism from the empty set to its connected boundary, we demonstrate how to use the data of a trisection map $\pi:X^{4} \to \mathbb{D}^{2}$ to compute the induced cobordism maps on…

We present a simple combinatorial method to encode 3-dimensional manifolds, based on their Heegaard diagrams. The notion of a Gauss diagram of a 3-manifold is introduced. We check the conditions for a Gauss diagram to represent a closed…

It is well known that a three dimensional (closed, connected and compact) manifold is obtained by identifying boundary faces from a polyhedron P. The study of (\partial P)/~, the boundary \partial P with the polygonal faces identified in…

We illustrate the rich landscape of 4-manifold topology through the lens of counterexamples. We consider several of the most commonly studied equivalence relations on 4-manifolds and how they are related to one another. We explain…

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 interpret a normal surface in a (singular) three-manifold in terms of the homology of a chain complex. This allows us to study the relation between normal surfaces and their quadrilateral co-ordinates. Specifically, we give a proof of an…

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 apply mapping class group techniques and trisections to study intersection forms of smooth 4-manifolds. Johnson defined a well-known homomorphism from the Torelli group of a compact surface. Morita later showed that every homology…

A {\em $1-$vertex triangulation} of an oriented compact surface $S$ of genus $g$ is an embedded graph $T\subset S$ with a unique vertex such that all connected components of $S\setminus T$ are triangles (adjacent to exactly 3 edges of $T$).…