In this paper, we shall prove that any Heegaard splitting of a $\partial$-reducible 3-manifold $M$, say $M=W\cup V$, can be obtained by doing connected sums, boundary connected sums and self-boundary connected sums from Heegaard splittings of $n$ manifolds $M_{1},..., M_{n}$ where $M_{i}$ is either a solid torus or a $\partial$-irreducible manifold. Furthermore, $W\cup V$ is stabilized if and only if one of the factors is stabilized.
We construct infinitely many manifolds admitting both strongly irreducible and weakly reducible minimal genus Heegaard splittings. Both closed manifolds and manifolds with boundary tori are constructed.
C. Gordon conjectured that a connected sum of two Heegaard splittings is stabilized if and only if one of the two factors is stabilized (Problem 3.91 in Kirby's problem list). In this paper, we shall prove this conjecture.
This paper studies the question of whether minimal genus Heegaard splittings of exterior spaces of knots which are connected sums are weakly reducible or not. Furthermore it is shown that the Heegaard splittings of the knots used by Morimoto to show that tunnel number can be sub-additive are all strongly irreducible. These are the first examples of strongly irreducible minimal genus Heegaard splittings of composite knots. We also give a characterization of when is a set of primitive annuli on a handlebody simultaneously primitive. This characterization is different from that given in [Go].
Let (V,W;F) be a weakly reducible, unstabilized, genus three Heegaard splitting in an orientable, irreducible 3-manifold M. In this article, we prove that either the disk complex D(F) is contractible or F is critical. Hence, the topological index of F is two if F is topologically minimal.
We give a necessary and sufficient condition for a simple closed curve on the boundary of a genus two handlebody to decompose the handlebody into (torus with one boundary component times [0,1]. We use this condition to decide whether a simple closed curve on a genus two Heegaard surface is a GOF-knot (genus one fibered knot) which induces the Heegaard splitting. By using this, we determine the number and the positions with respect to the Heegaard splittings of GOF-knots in the 3-manifolds with reducible genus two Heegaard splittings. This is another proof of results of Morimoto and Baker.
In this paper, we use Heegaard Floer homology to study reducible surgeries. In particular, suppose K is a non-cable knot in the three-sphere with an L-space surgery. If p-surgery on K is reducible, we show that p equals 2g(K)-1. This implies that any knot with an L-space surgery has at most one reducible surgery, a fact that we show additionally for any knot of genus at most two.
Let $M$ be an orientable, irreducible $3$-manifold admitting a weakly reducible genus three Heegaard splitting as a minimal genus Heegaard splitting. In this article, we prove that if $[f]$, $[g]\in Mod(M)$ give the same correspondence between two isotopy classes of generalized Heegaard splittings consisting of two Heegaard splittings of genus two, say $[\mathbf{H}]\to[\mathbf{H}']$, then there exists a representative $h$ of the difference $[h]=[g]\cdot[f]^{-1}$ such that (i) $h$ preserves a suitably chosen embedding of the Heegaard surface $F'$ obtained by amalgamation from $\mathbf{H}'$ whic…
The manifold which admits a genus-$2$ reducible Heegaard splitting is one of the $3$-sphere, $\mathbb{S}^2 \times \mathbb{S}^1$, lens spaces and their connected sums. For each of those manifolds except most lens spaces, the mapping class group of the genus-$2$ splitting was shown to be finitely presented. In this work, we study the remaining generic lens spaces, and show that the mapping class group of the genus-$2$ Heegaard splitting is finitely presented for any lens space by giving its explicit presentation. As an application, we show that the fundamental groups of the spaces of the genus-$…
Let (V,W;F) be a weakly reducible, unstabilized, genus three Heegaard splitting in an orientable, irreducible 3-manifold M and DVW(F) the subset of the disk complex D(F) consisting of simplices having at least one vertex from V and at least one vertex from W. In this article, we describe the shape of DVW(F) and prove that there is a function from the components of DVW(F) to the isotopy classes of the generalized Heegaard splittings obtained by weak reductions from (V,W;F), where this function describes how the thick levels are embedded in the relevant compression bodies.
A Heegaard splitting which admits a unique pair of disjoint compression disks on distinct sides is said to be keen weakly reducible. This paper provides an construction of keen weakly reducible Heegaard splittings of arbitrary genus except 2. Furthermore, critical Heegaard splittings may yield if we change some conditions.
Haken showed that the Heegaard splittings of reducible 3-manifolds are reducible, that is, a reducing 2-sphere can be found which intersects the Heegaard surface in a single simple closed curve. When the genus of the "interesting" surface increases from zero, more complicated phenomena occur. Kobayashi showed that if a 3-manifold $M^3$ contains an essential torus $T$, then it contains one which can be isotoped to intersect a strongly irreducible Heegaard splitting surface $F$ in a collection of simple closed curves which are essential in $T$ and in $F$. In general there is no global bound on t…
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.
In this paper, we give infinitely many non-Haken hyperbolic genus three 3-manifolds each of which has a finite cover whose induced Heegaard surface from some genus three Heegaard surface of the base manifold is reducible but can be compressed into an incompressible surface. This result supplements [CG] and extends [MMZ].
We give a parity condition of a Heegaard diagram to show that it is unstabilized. This improves the result of [5]. As an application, we construct unstabilized Heegaard splittings by Dehn twists on any given Heegaard splitting.
Casson and Gordon gave the rectangle condition for strong irreducibility of Heegaard splittings [1]. We give a parity condition for irreducibility of Heegaard splittings of irreducible manifolds. As an application, we give examples of non-stabilized Heegaard splittings by doing a single Dehn twist.
We show that if a Heegaard splitting is the result of stabilizing a high distance Heegaard splitting exactly once then its mapping class group is finitely generated.
We describe an example of a closed orientable 3-manifold with distinct distance three genus two Heegaard splittings. This demonstrates that the constructions of alternate genus two Heegaard splittings of closed orientable 3-manifolds described by Rubinstein and Scharlemann in their 1998 paper Genus Two Heegaard Splittings of Orientable 3-Manifolds, does not yield all alternate genus two splittings and must be augmented.
In this paper, we show that, for each non-trivial two bridge knot K and for each g > 2, every genus g Heegaard splitting of the exterior E(K) of K is reducible.
In this paper, we introduce a new concept of {\it strongly keen} for Heegaard splittings, and show that, for any integers $n\geq 2$ and $g\geq 3$, there exists a strongly keen Heegaard splitting of genus $g$ whose Hempel distance is $n$.
Every surface bundle with genus $g$ fiber has a canonical Heegaard splitting of genus $2g+1$. We classify the mapping class groups of such Heegaard splittings in the case when the surface bundle has a sufficiently complicated monodromy map.
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 amalgamated by a "sufficiently complicated" map, the resulting splitting is unstabilized. As a corollary, we produce a manifold that has distance one Heegaard splittings of arbitrarily high genus. Finally, we show that in a 3-manifold formed by a sufficiently complicated gluing, a low genus, unstabilized Heegaard splitting can be expressed in a unique way as an a…
Let $K_1, K_2$ be two knots with $t(K_1)+t(K_2)>2$ and $t(K_1 # K_2)=2$. Then, in the present paper, we will show that any genus three Heegaard splittings of $E(K_1 # K_2)$ is strongly irreducible and that $E(K_1 # K_2)$ has at most four genus three Heegaard splittings up to homeomorphism. Moreover, we will give a complete classification of those four genus three Heegaard splittings and show unknotting tunnel systems of knots $K_1 # K_2$ corresponding to those Heegaard splittings.
We show that if an orientable Seifert fibered space $M$ with an orientable genus $g$ base space admits a strongly irreducible horizontal Heegaard splitting then there is a one-to-one correspondence between isotopy classes of strongly irreducible horizontal Heegaard splittings and elements of $\mathbf{Z}^{2g}$. The correspondence is determined by the slopes of intersection of each Heegaard splitting with a collection of $2g$ incompressible tori in $M$. We also show that there are Seifert fibered spaces with infinitely many non-isotopic Heegaard splittings that determine Nielsen equivalent gener…
Little is known on the classification of Heegaard splittings for hyperbolic 3-manifolds. Although Kobayashi gave a complete classification of Heegaard splittings for the exteriors of 2-bridge knots, our knowledge of other classes is extremely limited. In particular, there are very few hyperbolic manifolds that are known to have a unique minimal genus splitting. Here we demonstrate that an infinite class of hyperbolic knot exteriors, namely exteriors of certain "twisted torus knots" originally studied by Morimoto, Sakuma and Yokota, have a unique minimal genus Heegaard splitting of genus two. W…
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.
We define a notion of Hempel distance for one-sided Heegaard splittings and show that the existence of alternate surfaces restricts distance for one-sided splittings in a manner similar to Hartshorn's and Scharlemann-Tomova's results for two-sided splittings. We also show that every geometrically compressible one-sided Heegaard surface in a non-Haken 3-manifold is stabilized, and show that the mapping class group of the two-sided Heegaard splitting induced by a high distance one-sided splitting is isomorphic to the fundamental group of the one-sided surface.
Non-isotopic Heegaard splittings of non-minimal genus were known previously only for very special 3-manifolds. We show in this paper that they are in fact a wide spread phenomenon in 3-manifold theory: We exhibit a large class of knots and manifolds obtained by Dehn surgery on these knots which admit such splittings. Many of the manifolds have irreducible Heegaard splittings of arbitrary large genus. All these splittings are horizontal and are isotopic, after one stabilization, to a multiple stabilization of certain canonical low genus vertical Heegaard splittings.
It is known that there are surface bundles of arbitrarily high genus which have genus two Heegaard splittings. The simplest examples are Seifert fibered spaces with the sphere as a base space, three exceptional fibers and which allow horizontal surfaces. We characterize the monodromy maps of all surface bundles with genus two Heegaard splittings and show that each is the result of integral Dehn surgery in one of these Seifert fibered spaces along loops where the Heegaard surface intersects a horizontal surface. (This type of surgery preserves both the bundle structure and the Heegaard splittin…
We show that after one stabilization, a strongly irreducible Heegaard splitting of suitably large genus of a graph manifold is isotopic to an amalgamation along a modified version of the system of canonical tori in the JSJ decomposition. As a corollary, two strongly irreducible Heegaard splittings of a graph manifold of suitably large genus are isotopic after at most one stabilization of the higher genus splitting.
This paper studies Heegaard splittings of surface bundles via the curve complex of the fibre. The translation distance of the monodromy is the smallest distance it moves any vertex of the curve complex. We prove that the translation distance is bounded above in terms of the genus of any strongly irreducible Heegaard splitting. As a consequence, if a splitting surface has small genus compared to the translation distance of the monodromy, the splitting is standard.
An updated proof of a 1933 theorem of Goeritz, exhibiting a finite set of generators for the group of automorphisms of the 3-sphere that preserve a genus two Heegaard splitting. The group is analyzed via its action on a certain connected 2-complex. (The analogous problem for higher genus Heegaard splittings appears to remain unresolved.)
Let M be a totally orientable graph manifold with characteristic submanifold T and let M = V cup_S W be a Heegaard splitting. We prove that S is standard. In particular, S is the amalgamation of strongly irreducible Heegaard splittings. The splitting surfaces S_i of these strongly irreducible Heegaard splittings have the property that for each vertex manifold N of M, S_i cap N is either horizontal, pseudohorizontal, vertical or pseudovertical.
Following an example discovered by John Berge, we show that there is a 4-component link L \subset (S^1 x S^2)#(S^1 x S^2) so that, generically, the result of Dehn surgery on L is a 3-manifold with two inequivalent genus 2 Heegaard splittings, and each of these Heegaard splittings is of Hempel distance 3.
Suppose that a three-manifold M contains infinitely many distinct strongly irreducible Heegaard splittings H + nK, obtained by Haken summing the surface H with n copies of the surface K. We show that K is incompressible. All known examples, of manifolds containing infinitely many irreducible Heegaard splittings, are of this form. We also give new examples of such manifolds.
In this paper, we show that, for any integers $n\geq 2$ and $g\geq 2$, there exist genus-$g$ Heegaard splittings of compact 3-manifolds with distance exactly $n$.
We show that for any two Heegaard splittings of genus $p$ and $q$ for the same closed 3-manifold, there is a common stabilization of genus at most 3/2 p + 2q - 1. One may compare this to recent examples of Heegaard splittings whose smallest common stabilizations have genus at least $p+q$ or $p + 1/2 q$ depending on the notion of equivalence.
The mapping class group of a Heegaard splitting is the group of connected components in the set of automorphisms of the ambient manifold that map the Heegaard surface onto itself. For the genus three Heegaard splitting of the 3-torus, we find an eight element generating set for this group. Six of these generators induce generating elements of the mapping class group of the 3-torus and the remaining two are isotopy trivial in the 3-torus.
We use Heath's, Moriah's and Schultens's results to prove that irreducible Heegaard splittings of orientable Seifert manifolds with nonorientable base space are either vertical or horizontal.
From the view of Heegaard splitting, it is known that if a closed orientable 3-manifold admits a distance at least three Heegaard splitting, then it is hyperbolic. However, for a closed orientable 3-manifold admitting only distance at most two Heegaard splittings, there are examples shows that it could be reducible, Seifert, toroidal or hyperbolic. According to Thurston's Geometrization conjecture, the most important piece of eight geometries is hyperbolic. Thus to read out a hyperbolic 3-manifold from a distance two Heegaard splittings is critical in studying Heegaard splittings. Inspired by …
The mapping class group of a Heegaard splitting is the group of automorphisms of the ambient 3-manifold that take the surface onto itself, modulo isotopies that keep the surface on itself. We characterize the mapping classes that restrict to periodic and reducible automorphisms of the surface.
Colding and Gabai have given an effective version of Li's theorem that non-Haken hyperbolic 3-manifolds have finitely many irreducible Heegaard splittings. As a corollary of their work, we show that Haken hyperbolic 3-manifolds have a finite collection of strongly irreducible Heegaard surfaces $S_i$ and incompressible surfaces $K_j$ such that any strongly irreducible Heegaard surface is a Haken sum $S_i + \sum_j n_j K_j$, up to one-sided associates of the Heegaard surfaces.
Let ${\mathcal H}$ be the group of isotopy classes of orientation preserving homeomorphisms of $S^3$ that preserve a Heegaard splitting of genus two. In this paper, we use a tree in the barycentric subdivision of the disk complex of a handlebody of the splitting to obtain a finite presentation of ${\mathcal H}$.
We address a special case of the Stabilization Problem for Heegaard splittings, establishing an upper bound on the number of stabilizations required to make a Heegaard splitting of a Haken 3-manifold isotopic to an amalgamation along an essential surface. As a consequence we show that for any positive integer $n$ there are 3-manifolds containing an essential torus and a Heegaard splitting such that the torus and splitting surface must intersect in at least $n$ simple closed curves. These give the first examples of lower bounds on the minimum number of curves of intersection between an essentia…
Using basic properties of one-sided Heegaard splittings, a direct proof that geometrically compressible one-sided splittings of RP^3 are stabilised is given. The argument is modelled on that used by Waldhausen to show that two-sided splittings of S^3 are standard.
The Goeritz group of the standard genus-g Heegaard splitting of the three sphere, $G_g$, acts on the space of isotopy classes of reducing spheres for this Heegaard splitting. Scharlemann MR2199366 (2007c:57020) uses this action to prove that $G_2$ is finitely generated. In this article, we give an algorithm to construct any reducing sphere from a standard reducing sphere for a genus-2 Heegaard splitting of the $S^3$. Using this we give an alternate proof of the finite generation of $G_2$ assuming the finite generation of the stabilizer of the standard reducing sphere.
We use technology from sutured manifold theory and the theory of Heegaard splittings to relate genus reducing crossing changes on knots in S^3 to twists on surfaces arising in circular Heegaard splittings for knot complements. In a separate paper, currently in preparation, we prove that these circular Heegaard splittings may be searched for algorithmically, and together our results imply that an algorithm to detect when two hyperbolic or fibered knots of different genus are related by a crossing change would follow from an algorithm to determine whether two compact oriented surfaces in S^3 are…
We show that if the Hempel distance of a Heegaard splitting is larger than three then the mapping class group of the Heegaard splitting is isomorphic to a subgroup of the mapping class group of the ambient 3-manifold. This implies that given two handlebody sets in the curve complex for a surface that are distance at least four apart, the group of automorphisms of the curve complex that preserve both handlebody sets is finite.
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 3-manifold that has $n$ pairwise non-isotopic Heegaard splittings of the same genus all of which are stabilized.
In this paper, by putting a separating incompressible surface in a 3-manifold into Morse position relative to the height function associated to a strongly irreducible Heegaard splitting, we show that an incompressible subsurface of the Heegaard splitting can be found, by decomposing the 3-manifold along the separating surface. Further if the Heegaard surface is of Hempel distance at least 4, then there is a pair of such subsurfaces on both sides of the given separating surface. This gives a particularly simple hierarchy for the 3-manifold.
We show that under reasonable conditions, the spines of the handlebodies of a strongly irreducible Heegaard splitting will intersect a closed ball in a graph which is isotopic into the boundary of the ball. This is in some sense a generalization of the results by Scharlemann on how a strongly irreducible Heegaard splitting surface can intersect a ball.
We show that every p-fold strictly-cyclic branched covering of a b-bridge link in $S^3$ admits a p-symmetric Heegaard splitting - in the sense of Birman and Hilden - of genus $g=(b-1)(p-1)$. This gives a complete converse of one of the results of the two authors. Moreover, we introduce the concept of weakly p-symmetric Heegaard splittings and prove similar results in this more general context.
We present a new proof of Reidemeister and Singer's Theorem that any two Heegaard splittings of the same 3-manifold have a common stabilization. The proof leads to an upper bound on the minimal genus of a common stabilization in terms of the number of negative slope inflection points and type-two cusps in a Rubinstein-Scharlemann graphic for the two splittings.
A Heegaard splitting of an open 3-manifold is the partition of the manifold into two non-compact handlebodies which intersect on their common boundary. This paper proves several non-compact analogues of theorems about compact Heegaard splittings. The main theorem is: if N is a compact, connected, orientable 3-manifold with non-empty boundary, containing no S^2 components, and if M is obtained from N by removing the boundary then any two Heegaard splittings of M are properly ambient isotopic. This is a non-compact analogue of the classifications of splittings of (closed surface) x I and (closed…
We construct simple curves from immersed curves in the setting of handlebodies and Heegaard splittings. We define a measure of complexity we call girth for closed curves in a handlebody. We extend this complexity to Heegaard splittings and pose a conjecture about all Heegaard splittings. We prove a test case of this conjecture. Let S be a compact surface embedded in the boundary of a handlebody H. Then the minimum girth over all curves in S can be achieved by a simple closed curve. We also present algorithms to compute the girth of curves and surfaces.
