Trisections of surface complements and the Price twist (Q1985996)

A \(\textit{trisection}\) of a smooth 4-manifold \(X\) is a decomposition \(X=X_1 \cup X_2 \cup X_3\) into three copies of \(\natural_k S^1 \times B^3\) whose pairwise intersections are copies of \(\natural_g S^1 \times B^2\) and whose triple intersection is a compact surface \(\Sigma\); this notion was introduced by \textit{D. T. Gay} and \textit{R. Kirby} [Geom. Topol. 20, No. 6, 3097--3132 (2016; Zbl 1372.57033)]. When \(X\) has non-empty boundary, the surface \(\Sigma\) has boundary and one refers to a \(\textit{relative trisection}\). A (relative) trisection can be encoded by a triple \((\alpha,\beta,\gamma)\) of embedded collections of curves on \(\Sigma\). This is known as a \(\textit{trisection diagram}\); see e.g. [\textit{N. A. Castro} et al., Pac. J. Math. 294, No. 2, 275--305 (2018; Zbl 1394.57015)]. This article produces trisection diagrams for some particular 4-manifolds, known as Price twists (Section 5); along the way the authors also explain how to exhibit relative trisections (and their diagrams) for surface exteriors (Section 4). Here, given a smooth embedding \(S \subset X^4\) of a real projective plane \(\mathbb{R} P^2\) in a \(4\)-manifold \(X\), the \(\textit{Price twist}\) is a \(4\)-manifold \(\Sigma_S(X)\) obtained from \(X\) by cutting out \(\nu S\) and regluing it in via a certain diffeomorphism of \(\partial(X \setminus \nu S) \cong \partial (\nu S)\). This construction was introduced by \textit{T. M. Price} [J. Aust. Math. Soc., Ser. A 23, 112--128 (1977; Zbl 0423.57006)]. Further details on this construction and on its outcomes are recalled in Section 3 of this paper; most notably the fact that \(\Sigma_S(S^4)\) is a homotopy 4-sphere.