Bitwist 3-manifolds (Q1007205)

A face-pairing of a faceted 3-ball sews together \(2\)-cells of the boundary sphere isomorphically in pairs. The resulting quotient cell complex is a closed 3-dimensional pseudomanifold, but it is rarely a manifold. However, it is known that every closed, connected 3-manifold is the quotient of some face-pairing. In earlier papers [Math. Res. Lett. 7, No. 4, 477--491 (2000; Zbl 0958.57021); Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 354, No.6, 2369-2397 (2002; Zbl 0986.57015); Algebr. Geom. Topol. 3, 235--285 (2003; Zbl 1025.57026)], the authors developed a construction, the method of twisted face-pairing, that corrects the non-manifold defect of the quotient pseudomanifold systematically. The method takes as input an arbitrary orientation-reversing face-pairing and has output an infinite parametrized family of face-pairings, each having a closed, orientable 3-manifold as quotient. It is unknown if every closed, connected, orientable 3-manifold is the quotient of some twisted face-pairing (for example, the 3-torus has not been so constructed nor has any manifold with the geometry of the hyperbolic plane times the line; the authors have conjectured that it is impossible to construct these manifolds by twisted face-pairing). In the present paper, the authors introduce a modification of the method of twisted face-pairing, called bitwisted face-pairing, and show that every closed, connected, orientable 3-manifold is the quotient of some bitwisted face-pairing (this uses the Dehn-Lickorish theorem that every such manifold can be obtained by Dehn surgery on a framed link). The original method modified the given face-pairing by twisting all faces in the same direction. The new method allows for twisting in different directions. Since adjacent faces might be twisted in different directions, clever geometric ideas are involved. Interesting examples arise. For example, if one starts with a simple face-pairing of the tetrahedron which yields the 3-sphere as quotient, then the Brieskorn homology sphere \(\Sigma(2,3,7)\) can arise by the bitwisted face-pairing construction. The authors also describe the Heegaard diagram naturally associated to a bitwisted face-pairing.