Stable maps and links in 3-manifolds (Q1345382)

The author studies stable maps from a 3-manifold into a surface. In particular, he shows some conditions that a link in the 3-sphere is trivial in terms of stable maps. He also introduces three invariants for a link \(L\) in the 3-sphere by using stable maps from \(S^3\) into \(\mathbb{R}^2\). Let \(f\) be a stable map such that \(L\) is the inverse image of a regular value, \(g\) be a stable map such that the singular set of \(g\) is \(L\), and \(h\) be a stable map such that \(h |L\) is an embedding and that the image of \(L\) and the singular value do not intersect. Denote by \(f_0\) the restriction to \(S^3 \subset \mathbb{R}^4\) of the projection \(\mathbb{R}^4 \to \mathbb{R}^2\). Then the invariant \(F(L)\) \((S(L)\), \(T(L)\), respectively) is defined to be the minimum number of \(b(f, f_0)\), \((b(g,f_0)\), \(b(h,f_0)\) respectively) over all such \(f\) \((g,h\), respectively), where \(b(f_1, f_2)\) counts the number of nonstable maps in the family of maps connecting \(f_1\) and \(f_2\).