Genera and minors of multibranched surfaces (Q2405103)

It is known due to Menger and Nöbeling that any finite 2-dimensional CW complex can be embedded into the 5-space \(\mathbb{R}^5\), and this is the best possible result. In this paper, the authors consider 2-dimensional CW complexes called multibranched surfaces which can be embedded into \(\mathbb{R}^4\). A multibranched surface is a 2-dimensional CW complex such that when we remove all points that have an open neighborhood homeomorphic to \(\mathbb{R}^2\) we are left with a 1-manifold. Every multibranched surface is embeddable into \(\mathbb{R}^4\). A multibranched surface is embeddable into some closed orientable 3-manifold if and only if it is ``regular''. \newline The main results are as follow. For a regular multibranched surface \(X\), the authors define the minimal genus of \(X\), denoted by \(g(X)\), as the minimum number of embeddable genera of neighborhoods of \(X\). Here, for an orientable compact 3-manifold \(M\) with boundary, the embeddable genus of \(M\) is the minimal Heegaard genus of a closed orientable 3-manifold into which \(M\) is embeddable. The authors give upper bounds for \(g(X)\). The authors compute the first homology group of a connected and regular multibranched surface. The authors define minors for multibranched surfaces as an analog to those of finite graphs. The authors also introduce the notion of an intrinsically knotted or intrinsically linked multibranched surface, and investigate properties of minors with respect to this notion.