Compact 3-manifolds via 4-colored graphs (Q326698)

It is well-known that closed PL \(n\)-manifolds may be combinatorially represented by (regular) \textit{\((n+1)\)-colored graphs}, which are dual to their \textit{colored triangulations}: see for example the survey papers [\textit{M. Ferri} et al., Aequationes Math. 31, 121--141 (1986; Zbl 0623.57012)] and [\textit{P. Bandieri} et al., Atti Semin. Mat. Fis. Univ. Modena Reggio Emilia 58, 11--45 (2011; Zbl 1263.57018)], or the book [\textit{S. Lins}, Gems, computers and attractors for 3-manifolds. Singapore: World Scientific (1995; Zbl 0868.57002)]. The present paper introduces, in the 3-dimensional setting, a representation by regular 4-colored graphs for all compact 3-manifolds without spherical boundary components. The construction generalizes the previous one and it is strictly related to (generalized) Heegaard splittings. The authors prove a lot of results, mainly concerning fundamental groups, combinatorial moves ``translating'' homeomorphism, connected sums and complexity. The representation turns out to be very convenient for computer aided generation and cataloguing: as a first step, the paper contains the complete classification of all compact orientable (resp. non-orientable) 3-manifolds representable by 4-colored graphs with 8 (resp. 6) vertices at most. A further step is obtained in [the first author et al., ``4-colored graphs and knot/link complements'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1609.02357}].