Thin position for knots, links, and graphs in 3-manifolds (Q1747129)

The concept of thin position was originally introduced by \textit{D. Gabai} [J. Differ. Geom. 26, 479--536 (1987; Zbl 0639.57008)] for a knot in the 3-sphere. Later, Gabai's basic idea was applied by \textit{M. Scharlemann} and \textit{A. Thompson} [Contemp. Math. 164, 231--238 (1994; Zbl 0818.57013)] to study the structure of Heegaard splittings of 3-manifolds. This paper shows that we can define a related notion of thin position for pairs of a 3-manifold and a graph properly embedded in the manifold. This generalization can be done as follows. The authors first define a \textit{vp-compression body} as a pair of a compression body and a properly embedded graph, which is a generalization of compression bodies. Here ``vp'' means ``vertex-punctured''. Then we can naturally define a \textit{vp-bridge surface} and a \textit{multiple vp-bridge surface} as generalizations of a Heegaard surface and a generalized Heegaard surface, respectively. Next the authors carefully generalize well-known operations like destabilization, unperturbation and untelescoping to simplify bridge surfaces. The complexity they define always decreases under these operations and guarantees that a sequence of such operations is always finite. This shows the existence of (locally) thin position for pairs of a 3-manifold and a graph properly embedded in the manifold. As applications, we can define two new invariants for graphs in 3-manifolds which are generalizations of bridge index and width for knots.