Surfaces and branched surfaces transverse to pseudo-Anosov flows on 3- manifolds (Q1176348)

The author studies circular pseudo-Anosov flows on 3-manifolds, namely suspension flows of pseudo-Anosov flows of surfaces, and refines results of S. Schwartzmann and D. Fried on cross sections to such flows. Given such a flow \(\varphi\) on a 3-manifold \(M\), he classifies all surfaces in \(M\) which are transverse and ``almost transverse'' to \(\varphi\). In particular, there exists an ``almost transverse'' surface representing any class in \(H_ 2(M)\) which has non-negative intersection with all periodic orbits of \(\varphi\). Applications are given to the existence of a branched surface carrying norm-minimizing representatives for the homology classes in a given face of Thurston's polyhedral norm on \(H_ 2(M)\).