High distance Heegaard splittings from involutions (Q624406)

In this brief paper, the author constructs closed orientable 3-manifolds with Heegaard splittings whose Heegaard distance is arbitrarily large. Fixing a handle-body, the examples are obtained by gluing the given handle-body and its mirror image along an appropriate involution of its boundary. In earlier work, \textit{J. Hempel} [Topology 40, No. 3, 631--657 (2001; Zbl 0985.57014)] used pseudo-Anosov maps to construct arbitrarily high distance Heegaard splittings for any fixed genus.