Triangulating 3-manifolds using 5 vertex link types (Q1110138)

The authors show that every closed orientable 3-manifold M may be triangulated in such a way that the star of each vertex is simplicially isomorphic to one of a set of 5 fixed triangulations of the 3-ball. Precisely the set of 5 triangulations of the 3-ball are: the barycentric subdivision of the 3-simplex; the cone over the suspension of a square; and the cones over barycentric subdivisions of the suspensions of a triangle, a square, and a pentagon. While it is known that a finite set of triangulations of the n-ball with this property exists for each dimension n, the authors' result gives the first explicit description of such a set for \(n>2\). The proof is based on the universality of the Borromean link in \(S^ 3\). Thus every closed orientable 3-manifold M is a branched cover over \(S^ 3\) with the Borromean rings as branch locus. This branched cover is used to construct a paving of M by cubes (that is, a cell complex decomposition of M in which each 3-cell is a cube) with the property that each edge of the paving meets 3, 4, or 5 cubes and that the set of edges meeting 3 or 5 cubes is a disjoint union of circles. The desired triangulation, whose vertex link types are among the 5 given ones, is obtained by uniformly triangulating the cubes.