Related papers: Horizontal decompositions, I

Generalizing Heegaard splittings of 3-manifolds and trisections of 4-manifolds, we consider multisections of higher-dimensional smooth (or PL) closed orientable manifolds, namely decompositions into 1-handlebodies whose subcollections…

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…

Let $M$ be a smooth, orientable, closed, connected $4$-manifold and suppose that $H_1(M;\mathbb{Z})$ is finitely generated and has no $2$-torsion. We give a homotopy decomposition of the suspension of $M$ in terms of spheres, Moore spaces…

A trisection of a smooth, closed, oriented 4-manifold is a decomposition into three 4-dimensional 1-handlebodies meeting pairwise in 3-dimensional 1-handlebodies, with triple intersection a closed surface. The fundamental groups of the…

In this article we show that every closed oriented smooth 4-manifold can be decomposed into two codimension zero submanifolds (one with reversed orientation) so that both pieces are exact Kahler manifolds with strictly pseudoconvex…

We construct the first examples of rationally convex surfaces in the complex plane with hyperbolic complex tangencies. In fact, we give two very different types of rationally convex surfaces: those that admit analytic fillings by…

We show that the number of double points of smoothly immersed 2-spheres representing certain homology classes of an oriented, smooth, closed, simply-connected 4-manifold X must increase with the complexity of corresponding h-cobordisms from…

We study simple wrinkled fibrations, a variation of the simplified purely wrinkled fibrations introduced by Williams, and their combinatorial description in terms of surface diagrams. We show that simple wrinkled fibrations induce handle…

We prove that a closed 4-manifold has shadow-complexity zero if and only if it is a kind of 4-dimensional graph manifold, which decomposes into some particular blocks along embedded copies of S^2 x S^1, plus some complex projective spaces.…

We determine which connected surfaces can be partitioned into topological circles. There are exactly seven such surfaces up to homeomorphism: those of finite type, of Euler characteristic zero, and with compact boundary components. As a…

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…

In this paper, we consider decompositions of 3-manifolds with three handlebodies. We classify such decompositions of the 3-sphere and lens spaces with small genera. These decompositions admit operations called stabilizations. We also…

We construct examples of nonresolvable generalized $n$-manifolds, $n\geq 6$, with arbitrary resolution obstruction, homotopy equivalent to any simply connected, closed $n$-manifold. We further investigate the structure of generalized…

In any dimension at least five we construct examples of closed smooth manifolds with the following properties: 1) they have neither real projective nor flat conformal structures; 2) their fundamental group is a non-elementary Gromov…

Let $(X, \omega, c_X)$ be a real symplectic 4-manifold with real part $R X$. Let $L \subset R X$ be a smooth curve such that $[L] = 0 \in H_1 (R X ; Z / 2Z)$. We construct invariants under deformation of the quadruple $(X, \omega, c_X, L)$…

A Riemannian manifold is called geometrically formal if the wedge product of any two harmonic forms is again harmonic. We classify geometrically formal compact 4-manifolds with nonnegative sectional curvature. If the sectional curvature is…

We discuss closed symplectic 4-manifolds which admit full symplectic packings by $N$ equal balls for large $N$'s. We give a homological criterion for recognizing such manifolds. As a corollary we prove that ${\Bbb C}P^2$ can be fully packed…

We classify small contractions of (holomorphically) symplectic 4-folds.

The topology of Stein surfaces and contact 3-manifolds is studied by means of handle decompositions. A simple characterization of homeomorphism types of Stein surfaces is obtained --- they correspond to open handlebodies with all handles of…

We build handle decompositions of n-manifolds that encode given open book decompositions and describe handle slides that reveal new open book decompositions on the same underlying manifold, for $n \geq 3$. This recovers known stabilization…