The dual tree of a fold map germ from to

Abstract

Let $f\colon (\mathbb {R}^{3},0)\to (\mathbb {R}^{4},0)$ be an analytic map germ with isolated instability. Its link is a stable map which is obtained by taking the intersection of the image of $f$ with a small enough sphere $S^{3}_\epsilon$ centred at the origin in $\mathbb {R}^{4}$. If $f$ is of fold type, we define a tree, that we call dual tree, that contains all the topological information of the link and we prove that in this case it is a complete topological invariant. As an application we give a procedure to obtain normal forms for any topological class of fold type.