Related papers: Taut branched surfaces from veering triangulations

Any hyperbolic surface bundle over the circle gives rise to a continuous surjection from the circle to the sphere, by work of Cannon and Thurston. We prove that the order in which this surjection fills out the sphere is dictated by a…

We establish the existence of a non-trivial, branched immersion of a closed Riemann surface $\Sigma$ with constant mean curvature (CMC) $H$ into any closed, orientable 3-manifold $\mathcal{M}$, for almost every prescribed value of $H$. The…

Landry, Minsky, and Taylor introduced an invariant of veering triangulations called the taut polynomial. Via a connection between veering triangulations and pseudo-Anosov flows, it generalizes the Teichm\"uller polynomial of a fibered face…

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 1976, Thurston proved that taut foliations on closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds have Euler class of norm at most one, and conjectured that conversely, any integral second cohomology class with norm equal to one is the Euler class of a taut…

The branched virtual fibering theorem by Sakuma states that every closed orientable $3$-manifold with a Heegaard surface of genus $g$ has a branched double cover which is a genus $g$ surface bundle over the circle. It is proved by Brooks…

We introduce and analyze the characteristic foliation induced by a contact structure on a branched surface, in particular a branched standard spine of a 3-manifold. We extend to (fairly general) singular foliations of branched surfaces the…

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…

We consider an optical hypersurface $\Sigma$ in the cotangent bundle $\tau:T^*M\to M$ of a closed manifold $M$ endowed with a twisted symplectic structure. We show that if the characteristic foliation of $\Sigma$ is Anosov, then a smooth…

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…

We present a combinatorial approach to the existence of foliations and contact structures transverse to a given pseudo-Anosov flow. Let $\varphi$ be a transitive pseudo-Anosov flow on a closed oriented 3-manifold. Our main technical result…

This paper is the first part in a 2 part study of an elementary functorial construction from the category of finite non-abelian groups to a category of singular compact, oriented 2-manifolds. After a desingularization process this…

We show that all hyperbolic surfaces admit an ideal triangulation with bounded shear parameters. This upper bound depends logarithmically on the topology of the surface.

We study the left-orderability of the fundamental groups of cyclic branched covers of links which admit co-oriented taut foliations. In particular we do this for cyclic branched covers of fibred knots in integer homology $3$-spheres and…

Let $\mathbb{S}_h$ denote a sphere with $h$ holes. Given a triangulation $G$ of a surface $\mathbb{M}$, we consider the question of when $G$ contains a spanning subgraph $H$ such that $H$ is a triangulated $\mathbb{S}_h$. We give a new…

A surface $F$ in a 3-manifold $M$ is called cylindrical if $M$ cut open along $F$ admits an essential annulus $A$. If, in addition, $(A, \partial A)$ is embedded in $(M, F)$, then we say that $F$ is strongly cylindrical. Let $M$ be a…

We investigate the combinatorial analogues, in the context of normal surfaces, of taut and transversely measured (codimension 1) foliations of 3-manifolds. We establish that the existence of certain combinatorial structures, a priori weaker…

We consider triangulations of closed $2$-dimensional (not necessarily orientable) surfaces. Any minimal set of zigzags that double covers the set of edges provides a $z$-orientation of the triangulation. We introduce Markov chains of…

From a transverse veering triangulation (not necessarily finite) we produce a canonically associated dynamic pair of branched surfaces. As a key idea in the proof, we introduce the shearing decomposition of a veering triangulation.

Motivated by fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) problems in computational topology, we consider the treewidth of a compact, connected 3-manifold $M$ defined by \[ \operatorname{tw}(M) =…