2-handle additions producing toroidal and reducible manifolds (Q2676973)

Handle addition is a common and important method to construct a new 3-manifold from the original 3-manifold. Heegaard splittings and Dehn surgery are both related to handle addition. When we attach 2-handles to a 3-manifold along different slopes, we may obain different 3-manifolds. In this article, \(M\) denotes a compact, orientable, simple 3-manifold, with \(F\) a boundary component of genus at least two. Denote by \(\alpha\) a slope, that is, an isotopy class of a simple closed curve on \(F\) and denote by \(M[\alpha]\) the result of attaching a 2-handle to \(M\) along a regular neighborhood of a representative of \(\alpha\) in \(F\). Hence \(\alpha\) bounds a disk in \(M[\alpha]\). Note that \(M[\alpha]\) may not be simple, that is, \(M[\alpha]\) may contain some essential spheres, tori, annuli, disks. For two slopes \(\alpha\) and \(\beta\), denote by \(\Delta = \Delta(\alpha, \beta)\) the minimal geometric intersection number between the isotopy classes of \(\alpha\) and \(\beta\). Many results show that upper bounds on \(\Delta\) have a deep relationship with properties of 3-manifolds. In this article, the author is interested in the case that \(M\) is simple while both \(M[\alpha]\) and \(M[\beta]\) are toroidal. The author shows that if both the two slopes are separating and both 2-handles attaching \(M[\alpha]\) and \(M[\beta]\) are toroidal then \(\Delta\leq 10\) or \(\Delta= 12\) or \(\Delta= 18\). In the cases \(\Delta= 12\) or \(\Delta= 18\), \(M[\alpha]\) and \(M[\beta]\) each contain an essential torus which intersects the 2-handle once and \(F\) has genus at least 4 or 8, respectively. As a corollary, if \(g(F) = 3\) then \(\Delta\leq 10\) and if \(g(F) = 2\) then \(\Delta\leq 8\). Moreover, if \(F\) has genus at least two and \(M[\alpha]\) is toroidal and \(M[\beta]\) is reducible then \(\Delta\leq 4\).