Related papers: Strong Haken via Thin Position

We construct families of manifolds that have pairs of genus $g$ Heegaard splittings that must be stabilized roughly $g$ times to become equivalent. We also show that when two unstabilized, boundary-unstabilized Heegaard splittings are…

We define a trisection of a closed, orientable three dimensional manifold into three handlebodies, and a notion of stabilization for these trisections. Several examples of trisections are described in detail. We define the trisection genus…

We give two criteria for diagrams of Heegaard splittings of 3-manifolds. Weaker one of them guarantees that the splitting is strongly irreducible, and the stronger one guarantees in addition that the Goeritz group is finite. They are…

We classify isotopy classes of irreducible Heegaard splittings of solvmanifolds. If the monodromy of the solvmanifold can be expressed as a 2 x 2 matrix with 0 in the lower right hand corner (as always is true when the absolute value of the…

A Heegaard splitting of a $3$-manifold is flippable if there is an isotopy that interchanges the two sides of the Heegaard splitting. We explore which Heegaard splittings of Seifert fibered spaces are flippable.

The infimal Heegaard gradient of a compact 3-manifold was defined and studied by Marc Lackenby in an approach toward the well-known virtually Haken conjecture. As instructive examples, we consider Seifert fibered 3-manifolds, and show that…

We find all Heegaard diagrams with the property "alternating" or "weakly alternating" on a genus two orientable closed surface. Using these diagrams we give infinitely many genus two 3--manifolds, each admits an automorphism whose…

Let $G$ be a finite group acting on a connected compact surface $\Sigma$, and $M$ be an integer homology 3-sphere. We show that if each element of $G$ is extendable over $M$ with respect to a fixed embedding $\Sigma\rightarrow M$, then $G$…

We show that sub-surfaces of a Heegaard surface for which the relative Hempel distance of the splitting is sufficiently high have to appear in any Heegaard surface of genus bounded by half that distance.

Let $M_1$ and $M_2$ be orientable irreducible 3--manifolds with connected boundary and suppose $\partial M_1\cong\partial M_2$. Let $M$ be a closed 3--manifold obtained by gluing $M_1$ to $M_2$ along the boundary. We show that if the gluing…

Given a 3-manifold M containing an incompressible surface Q, we obtain an inequality relating the Heegaard genus of M and the Heegaard genera of the components of M - Q. Here the sum of the genera of the components of M - Q is bounded above…

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…

The aim of this article is twofold: firstly, we show how to recover the smooth Deligne-Beilinson cohomology groups from a Heegaard splitting of a closed oriented smooth 3-manifold by extending the usual \tch-de Rham construction; secondly,…

The paper generalizes some of the well-known results for K3 surfaces to higher-dimensional irreducible symplectic (or, equivalently, compact irreducible hyperkaehler) manifolds. In particular, we discuss the projectivity of such manifolds…

We describe for each postive integer $k$ a 3-manifold with Heegaard surfaces of genus $2k$ and $2k-1$ such that any common stabilization of these two surfaces has genus at least $3k-1$. We also show that for every positive $n$, there is a…

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…

Let M be a closed, orientable, irreducible, non-simply connected 3-manifold. We prove that if M admits a sequence of Riemannian metrics whose sectional curvature is locally controlled and whose thick part becomes asymptotically hyperbolic…

In this paper we prove an area comparison result for certain totally geodesic surfaces in 3-manifolds with a lower bound on the scalar curvature. This result is a variant of a comparison theorem of Heintze-Karcher for minimal hypersurfaces…

This paper contains a purely topological theorem and a geometric application. The topological theorem states that if M is a simple closed orientable 3-manifold such that \pi_1(M) contains a genus g surface group and H_1(M;Z/2Z) has rank at…

Let M be an orientable closed connected 3-manifold. We introduce the notion of amalgamated Heegaard genus of M with respect to a closed separating 2-manifold F, and use it to show that the following two statements are equivalent: (i) a…