Sweepouts of amalgamated 3-manifolds (Q2492028)

It is a consequence of the Haken lemma and the uniqueness of prime decompositions that the Heegaard genus of 3-manifolds is additive under connected sum, that is, \(g(X \# Y) = g(X) + g(Y)\). The authors discuss the Heegaard splittings of a manifold obtained by gluing together \(3\)-manifolds along boundary components of higher genus. They prove that if two \(3\)-manifolds \(X\) and \(Y\) with toroidal boundary are glued via a ``sufficiently complicated'' map \(\varphi : \partial X \to \partial Y\), then every Heegaard splitting of the resulting \(3\)-manifold is weakly reducible. To define the term of sufficiently complicated, fix, once for all, pseudo-triangulations of \(X\) and \(Y\) with one vertex. (A pseudo-triangulation is a decomposition into simplices where any two such simplices intersect in a collection of lower dimensional simplices.) Let \(\Delta(X)\) be the set of slopes in \(\partial X\) which are the boundary of some normal or almost normal surface in \(X\). Note that \(\Delta(X)\) is finite by a result of \textit{W. Jaco} and \textit{E. Sedgwick} [Topology 42, 845--906 (2003; Zbl 1013.57013)]. The Farey graph \({\mathcal F}(X)\) is the graph whose vertices are all slopes in \(\partial X\), and two slopes are connected by an edge if they intersect once. The distance between two slopes is defined to be the minimal number of edges required in a path connecting them. The distance between two sets of slopes is the minimal distance between their elements. A map \(\varphi : \partial X \to \partial Y\) is said to be sufficiently complicated if the distance between \(\Delta(X)\) to \(\varphi^{-1}(\Delta(Y))\) inside of the Farey graph \({\mathcal F}(X)\) is at least two. In addition, suppose \(X \cup_F Y\) is a manifold obtained by gluing two connected small \(3\)-manifolds \(X\) and \(Y\) with incompressible boundary along a closed boundary surface \(F\). Then the authors obtain the following inequality on genera: \[ g(X \cup_F Y) \geq \tfrac{1}{2}(g(X) + g(Y) - 2 g(F)). \] (Of course, we have always that the genus of \(X\cup_F Y\) is equal or less than \(g(X) + g(Y) - g(F)\).) Both results follow from a new technique to simplify the intersection between an incompressible surface and a strongly irreducible Heegaard splitting.