Heegaard splittings of graph manifolds (Q5917558)

A Seifert fibered manifold is totally orientable if it is orientable and has an orientable base orbifold. A graph manifold is the union of Seifert fibered manifolds glued along boundary tori. More precisely, a graph manifold is a \(3\)-manifold modelled on a finite graph \(G\) as follows. Each vertex \(v\) of \(G\) corresponds to a Seifert fibered manifold \(M_v\), called a vertex manifold, each edge \(e\) of \(G\) corresponds to \(M_e=(\text{torus})\times I\), called an edge manifold, and the incidence of an edge \(e\) to a vertex \(v\) is realized by an identification of a boundary torus of \(M_e\) with a boundary torus of \(M_v\) via some homeomorphism. If each vertex manifold is totally orientable, then a graph manifold is said to be totally orientable. The subject of the paper is the structure of Heegaard splittings of totally orientable graph manifolds. There are the preceding works concerning the structure of Heegaard splittings for Seifert fibered manifolds mainly by the same author. Any incompressible surface in a totally orientable graph manifold can be isotoped so that in each edge manifold it consists of incompressible tori and annuli and in each vertex manifold it is either horizontal or vertical. A generalized graph manifold is a \(3\)-manifold which arises when a totally orientable graph manifold is cut along incompressible surfaces. The main result of the paper is the structural theorem showing that a strongly irreducible Heegaad splitting of a totally orientable generalized graph manifold is standard. This means that the Heegaard surface \(S\) can be isotoped so that in each vertex manifold it is horizontal, vertical, pseudohorizontal or pseudovertical, and in each edge manifold it is described in a certain way. As a general case, for a totally orientable graph manifold \(M\) and its irreducible Heegaard splitting \(M=V\cup_S W\), it is known that the splitting has a strongly irreducible untelescoping \(M=(V_1\cup_{S_1}W_1)\cup_{F_1}(V_2\cup_{S_2}W_2)\cup_{F_2}\dots\cup_{F_{m-1}}(V_m\cup_{S_m}W_m)\). Then \(M_i=V_i\cup W_i\) is a totally orientable generalized graph manifold, and the splitting \(M_i=V_i\cup_{S_i}W_i\) is strongly irreducible and standard. The structure theorem describes the various ways in which a Heegaard splitting can be constructed. Thus a totally orientable graph manifold possesses only finitely many Heegaard splittings up to isotopy. The paper has 46 pages, but includes the definition of a graph manifold, the basis definitions concerning Heegaard splittings, strongly irreducibility, untelescopings and amalgamations, and some motivational examples of Heegaard splittings for graph manifolds and generalized graph manifolds. The part of the analysis using the Rubinstein-Scharlemann graphic is lengthy and hard.