The end sum of surfaces
The paper under review deals with the notions of end sum and attaching 1-handles at infinity for surfaces, by proving some results which imply their uniqueness.\N\NIn geometric topology, gluing operations are very useful tools for constructing new examples of manifolds: for closed manifolds we have the classical \textit{connected sum}, for compact manifolds with boundary there is the so-called \textit{boundary sum}, while for open manifolds the situation is much more complicated. In this setting, the analogue of the boundary sum is the notion of \textit{end sum}, defined and used by Gompf in the 80's for constructing exotic examples of \(\mathbb R^4\).\N\NFor the boundary sum of two compact manifolds with boundaries one considers (codim 0) embeddings of a disk into the two boundaries and then one attaches a 1-handle between them. On the other hand, for general open manifolds, the gluing operation consists on attaching a \textit {1-handle at infinity} along properly embedded rays of the manifolds.\N\NThe problem of uniqueness appears naturally. First of all, one needs to specify the ends of the manifolds and their orientations, but also the rays which define the ends have to be properly homotopic. Note that the non uniqueness is related to strange behaviour at infinity, more precisely it comes from the presence of complicated fundamental groups at infinity of the ends. In order to simplify the situation and to obtain uniqueness, one can consider the \textit{semistability} condition which implies that any two rays of the end are properly homotopic. This condition assures that, in dimension at least 4, attaching a 1-handle at infinity to some semistable end is unique! The notion of \textit{end sum} is a special case of attaching a 1-handle at infinity, whenever a manifold has two components and one attaches a 1-handle at infinity among them.\N\NIn the present paper the authors instead study the end-sum of surfaces. In general, ends of non compact surfaces may present exotic and chaotic behaviour (infinite genus, non trivial fundamental group at infinity, not semistable etc). However, the authors prove the following interesting result, which also implies the uniqueness of end sum of two connected surfaces with connected boundary:\N\NTheorem: The operation of attaching a 1-handle at infinity to distinct ends of a surface with connected boundary depends only on the ends and on the orientations. If the ends lie in different components or in the same non-orientable component, then the orientation is irrelevant.\N\NFor the entire collection see [Zbl 1560.20003].
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