Casson-Gordon's rectangle condition of Heegaard diagrams and incompressible tori in 3-manifolds (Q921665)

Motivated by work of A. Casson and C. M. Gordon, the author derives conclusions about the incompressible tori in a 3-manifold from assumptions on its Heegaard splitting, called rectangle conditions. A Heegaard splitting \((C_ 1,C_ 2:F)\) of a 3-manifold M is a pair of compression bodies (e.g. handlebodies) \(C_ 1\) and \(C_ 2\) in M whose union is M and whose intersection F is the compressible boundary component of each of \(C_ 1\) and \(C_ 2\). Two discs-with-two-holes \(P_ 1\) and \(P_ 2\) in F are called tight if there are no 2-gons in F whose boundary arcs lie in \(P_ 1\) and \(P_ 2\), and if for each pair \(b_ 1,b_ 2\) of boundary circles of \(P_ 1\) and each pair \(b_ 1',b'_ 2\) of boundary circles of \(P_ 2\), there is a rectangle in F whose interior is disjoint from the boundaries of \(P_ 1\) and \(P_ 2\), and whose edges are subarcs of \(b_ 1\), \(b_ 2\), \(b'_ 1\), and \(b'_ 2\). Then, two collections of 3g-3 disjoint (essential, non-parallel) simple loops in F are said to satisfy a rectangle condition if the closure of each complementary region of the first collection (necessarily disc-with-two-holes) is tight with respect to the closure of each complementary region for the second collection. Finally, a Heegaard splitting \((C_ 1,C_ 2:F)\) is said to satisfy a rectangle condition if there are a collection of 3g-3 disjoint simple loops in F, each of which bounds either a disc or an incompressible, boundary-incompressible annulus in \(C_ 1\), and another such collection for \(C_ 2\), which satisfy a rectangle condition. Suppose that a Heegaard splitting \((C_ 1,C_ 2:F)\) of M satisfies a rectangle condition. A. Casson and C. M. Gordon proved that there are no discs \(D_ 1\) and \(D_ 2\) essentially and properly imbedded in \(C_ 1\) and \(C_ 2\) respectively with disjoint boundaries. This implies that M is irreducible. The author proves that any collection of disjoint essential tori in M is ambiently isotopic to a collection which intersects F only in loops essential in the tori. It follows that there are at most 3g-4 tori in a torus decomposition of M, where g is the genus of F, and they decompose M into at most \(3g-3-\beta_ 1(\Gamma)\) components, where \(\beta_ 1(\Gamma)\) is the first Betti number of the graph whose edges correspond to the tori and whose vertices correspond to the components of their complement. The author also defines a stronger rectangle condition which forces M to contain no essential tori; this definition is analogous to the rectangle condition but involves the discs-with-three-holes which are the unions of the closures of two contiguous complementary components of the collections of simple loops. These theorems are proven by involved combinatorial arguments by which the intersection of T with F is progressively simplified. In the course of these arguments, a loop in F is defined to be sufficiently complicated if its intersections with the collections of 3g-3 simple loops in F bounding discs or annuli in \(C_ 1\) and \(C_ 2\) are minimal and if in each complementary disc-with-two-holes, there are subarcs of the loop connecting each of the 3 pairs of boundary components. The author shows that the complement of such a loop in M is atoroidal, and hence, according to work of Thurston, hyperbolic. A final section contains explicit (and instructive) examples which show that the numerical estimates in all the theorems are best possible.