The unstabilized canonical Heegaard splitting of a mapping torus (Q2409980)

The author studies the (un)stability of a canonical Heegaard splitting of a mapping torus, i.e., a closed orientable 3-manifold fibering over the circle. Previously, in [``Ranks of mapping tori via the curve complex'', to appear in J. Reine Angew. Math., \url{doi:10.1515/crelle-2016-0031}], \textit{I. Biringer} and \textit{J. Souto} proved that a canonical Heegaard splitting of a mapping torus is unstabilized if its monodromy is ``complicated enough'', precisely, it has sufficiently large translation length in the curve complex. The main theorem in this paper states that a canonical Heegaard splitting is unstabilized if the translation length is at least 8. Also given is an infinite family of canonical Heegaard splittings which are all stabilized.