Disk surgery and the primitive disk complexes of the 3-sphere (Q2295676)

It is a well known fact that any closed, orientable 3-manifold possesses a Heegaard splitting. These Heegaard splittings are not unique, though, since we can increase the genus of any splitting by summing with them the genus-one splitting of the 3-sphere through a process called stabilization. The Reidemeister-Singer Theorem states that any two Heegaard splittings of the same 3-manifold have a common stabilization, but it doesn't suggest the minimal number of stabilizations of each splitting required to reach that common stabilization. For a genus-\(p\) and genus-\(q\) pair of Heegaard splittings of the same manifold, the Stabilization Conjecture states that the number of stabilizations required of either of these splittings to reach a common one is at most \(p+q\). Much work has been done toward showing this conjecture in the affirmative; but even for low-genus 3-manifolds, this proof remains elusive except for specific classes of 3-manifolds (e.g. the 3-sphere, lens spaces). The current article is yet another step closer to understanding the Stabilization Conjecture. The authors tackle it from the perspective of disk complexes, which are simplicial complexes representing handlebodies and measuring how entwined their compressing disks are. Specifically, the authors study the primitive disk complexes, which directly measure the structure of the stabilizations of the Heegaard splittings of a given 3-manifold. The structure of the primitive disk complexes of the genus-2 Heegaard splittings of \(S^3\), \(S^1\times S^2\), and lens spaces have been fully studied; but there are still questions about whether the properties of the low-genus complexes carry into higher-genus complexes. For instance, the authors concern themselves with the closure of the primitive disk complexes of the 3-sphere under various disk surgeries. Though it has been shown that its genus-2 complex is closed under disk surgery, they show that all of its complexes of genus three and higher are not closed under this operation even in a weak sense. With regards to the Stabilization Conjecture, which is verified for the 3-sphere via Waldhausen's Theorem, this result shows how complex the stabilization operation truly is and (perhaps more strikingly) how sensitive the primitive disk complex is to surgery operations. This article is a quick and leisurely read, and it is accessible to a wide range of audiences. The main result is constructive and easily digestible even upon a preliminary reading. While not earth-shattering, this result is important to catalog in a long string of articles by S. Cho and others (see [\textit{S. Cho}, Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 136, No. 3, 1113--1123 (2008; Zbl 1149.57025); Pac. J. Math. 265, No. 1, 1--16 (2013; Zbl 1290.57026); \textit{S. Cho} and \textit{Y. Koda}, Math. Res. Lett. 21, No. 3, 449--460 (2014; Zbl 1321.57023); Int. Math. Res. Not. 2016, No. 23, 7302--7340 (2016; Zbl 1404.57036); Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 371, No. 4, 2473--2502 (2019; Zbl 1406.57015)]) slowly building the known information about disk complexes and how they can be used to study 3-manifolds.