Thin position through the lens of trisections of 4-manifolds (Q2234351)

The present paper introduces and studies the notion of \textit{thin position} of a smooth compact \(4\)-manifold, together with the related one of \textit{width} of a handle decomposition of a \(4\)-manifold, thus generalizing the well known idea of thin position for 3-manifolds, introduced by \textit{M. Scharlemann} and \textit{A. Thompson} [Contemp. Math. 164, 231--238 (1994; Zbl 0818.57013)]. The authors succeed in classifying all connected \(4\)-manifolds with width \(\{1,1, \dots, 1\}\) and obtain an upper bound for the width of the double of a 4-manifold in terms of the width of the manifold itself. Interesting connections with the theory of trisections are also investigated. In particular, by making use of results by \textit{J. Meier} and \textit{A. Zupan} [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 369, No. 10, 7343--7386 (2017; Zbl 1376.57025)], the paper proves that a closed \(4\)-manifold \(M\) is the \(p\)-fold cyclic cover of \(\mathbb S^4\) branched along a knotted surface \(K^2 \subset \mathbb S^4\) if and only if \(M\) admits a \(p\)-symmetric trisection diagram.