Separating incompressible surfaces and stabilizations of Heegaard splittings (Q3159882)

The authors develop an approach for the description of 3-manifolds containing closed separating incompressible surfaces of arbitrary large genus and find a ``simplest'' manifold of such sort. This result provides two applications. 1. For a closed orientable 3-manifold \(M\) and any positive integer \(m\) the surgery along any link \(L\) in \(M\) with at most \(2m+1\) components provides an irreducible 3-manifold containing \(m\) disjoint non-parallel separaring surfaces of arbitrarily high genus. 2. There exist 3-manifold \(M\) containing separating incompressible surfaces \(S_n\) of arbitrarily large genera \(g(S_n)\) such that the amalgamation of minimal Heegaard splittings of two resulting 3-manifolds cutting along \(S_n\) can be stabilized \(g(S_n)-3\) times to a minimal Heegaard splitting of \(M\).