Gem-induced trisections of compact PL 4-manifolds

Abstract

Abstract The idea of studying trisections of closed smooth 4-manifolds via (singular) triangulations, endowed with a suitable vertex-labelling by three colors, is due to Bell, Hass, Rubinstein and Tillmann, and has been applied by Spreer and Tillmann to standard simply-connected 4-manifolds, via the so-called simple crystallizations. In the present paper we propose generalizations of these ideas by taking into consideration a possible extension of trisections to compact PL 4-manifolds with connected boundary, which is related to Birman’s special Heegaard sewing, and by analyzing gem-induced trisections, i.e. trisections that can be induced not only by simple crystallizations, but also by any 5-colored graph encoding a PL 4-manifold with empty or connected boundary. This last notion gives rise to that of G-trisection genus, as an analogue, in this context, of the well-known trisection genus. We give conditions on a 5-colored graph ensuring one of its gem-induced trisections – if any – to realize the G-trisection genus, and prove how to determine it directly from the graph. As a consequence, we detect a class of closed simply-connected 4-manifolds, comprehending all standard ones, for which both G-trisection genus and trisection genus coincide with the second Betti number and also with half the value of the graph-defined PL invariant regular genus. Moreover, the existence of gem-induced trisections and an estimation of the G-trisection genus via surgery description is obtained, for each compact PL 4-manifold admitting a handle decomposition lacking in 3-handles.