Flows and spines (Q911106)

A compact 2-dimensional polyhedron is called a closed fake surface if each point of P has a regular neighborhood homeomorphic to a regular neighborhood of one of the points of the set \(K=\{xyz=0\}\subset {\mathbb{R}}^ 3\). A fake surface P embedded in a 3-manifold M is called a standard spine of M if \(M\setminus N(P)\) is homeomorphic to a 3-ball (N(P) is a regular neighborhood of P in M). Starting with a ``normal pair'' in M, consisting of a nonsingular flow \(\Psi_ t\) on M and a special local section \(\Sigma\) of \(\Psi_ t\) (a pair \((\Psi_ t,\Sigma)\) with the required properties always exist) the author constructs flow-spines \(P_-(\Psi_ t,\Sigma)\) and \(P_+(\Psi_ t,\Sigma)\), which are standard spines, and shows how one can get the information about the orientability and fundamental group of M and even reconstruct M using the data about flow-spines.