Related papers: Compact 4-manifolds admitting special handle decom…
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…
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…
Simple crystallizations are edge-coloured graphs representing PL 4-manifolds with the property that the 1-skeleton of the associated triangulation equals the 1-skeleton of a 4-simplex. In the present paper, we prove that any…
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…
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},…
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…
We prove that a PL manifold admits a handle decomposition into handles of index $\le k$ if and only if $M$ is $k$-stacked, i.e., it admits a PL triangulation in which all $(d-k-1)$-faces are on $\partial M$. We use this to solve a problem…
The purpose of the present paper is twofold: firstly to extend to non-orientable compact 4-manifolds the notion of gem-induced trisection, directly obtained from colored triangulations (or, equivalently, from colored graphs encoding them,…
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…
Given a handle decomposition of a 4-manifold with boundary, and an open book decomposition of the boundary, we show how to produce a trisection diagram of a trisection of the 4-manifold inducing the given open book. We do this by making the…
We study which lens spaces can bound smooth 4-manifolds with second Betti number one under various topological conditions. Specifically, we show that there are infinite families of lens spaces that bound compact, simply-connected, smooth…
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 $p \colon M \darrow{d} N$…
We note that infinitely many irreducible, closed, simply connected 4-manifolds, with prescribed signature and spin type, admit perfect Morse functions, i.e. they can be given handle decompositions without 1- and 3-handles. In particular,…
We show that every smooth, closed, orientable 4-manifold X admits a special kind of handlebody decomposition that we call horizontal. We classify the closed 4-manifolds with the simplest horizontal decompositions and we describe all such…
We extend the theory of relative trisections of smooth, compact, oriented $4$-manifolds with connected boundary given by Gay and Kirby to include $4$-manifolds with an arbitrary number of boundary components. Additionally, we provide…
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…
Gay and Kirby recently introduced the concept of a trisection for arbitrary smooth, oriented closed 4-manifolds, and with it a new topological invariant, called the trisection genus. This paper improves and implements an algorithm due to…
A representation for compact 3-manifolds with non-empty non-spherical boundary via 4-colored graphs (i.e., 4-regular graphs endowed with a proper edge-coloration with four colors) has been recently introduced by two of the authors, and an…
A theorem on the existence of the unique minimal topologic handle decomposition of differentiable simply connected five-dimensional manifolds is proved. For a decomposition of this sort, the number of handles of each index is given.
We provide new branched covering representations for bounded and/or non-compact 4-manifolds, which extend the known ones for closed 4-manifolds. Assuming $M$ to be a connected oriented PL 4-manifold, our main results are the following: (1)…