Bridged links and tangle presentations of cobordism categories (Q1284168)

The author develops a calculus of bridged links, as a generalization of the famous Kirby calculus of framed links. Each component of a bridged link is either a regular framed knot, or a space consisting of some number of pairs of 3-balls connected by ribbons. If framed links describe 2-handle attachments to a boundary of a 4-manifold, the pairs of 3-balls describe attachments of 1-handles (compare to the ``dotted circles'' introduced by Kirby). As opposite to Kirby calculus, the calculus of bridged links is valid also on non-simply connected and disconnected manifolds. More specifically, the author has proved that if \(M\) and \(M_0\) are two compact orientable 3-manifolds, \(M\) is connected, and there is a homeomorphism \(\psi : \partial M_0 \to \partial M\), then there is a bridged link \(L\subset \text{int}(M_0)\) such that \(\psi\) can be extended to a homeomorphism \(\widetilde{\psi} : (M_0)_L \to M\), where \((M_0)_L\) is the 3-manifold obtained by the surgery on \(L\). Furthermore, the author proved that \((M_0)_{L_1}=(M_0)_{L_2}\) iff \(L_1\) and \(L_2\) are related by regular isotopy and four local moves (one of which is the signature move from Kirby calculus). Bridged link presentations on unions of handlebodies are used to give a Cerf-theoretical derivation of presentations of \((2+1)\)-dimensional cobordism categories in terms of planar ribbon tangles and their composition rules. As an application, the author gives a different proof of the Matveev-Polyak presentation of the mapping class group. The author also extends the definition of Reshetikhin-Turaev invariants to the bridged link surgery presentation of 3-manifolds. The new approach simplifies the proof of the invariance.