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Normal surfaces in non-compact 3-manifolds

Part of: Low-dimensional topology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 April 2009

Ensil Kang
Ensil Kang
Affiliation:
Department of MathematicsCollege of Natural Sciences Chosun UniversityGwangju 501-759Korea e-mail: ekang@chosun.ac.kr
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Abstract

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We extend the normal surface Q-theory to non-compact 3-manifolds with respect to ideal triangulations. An ideal triangulation of a 3-manifold often has a small number of tetrahedra resulting in a system of Q-matching equations with a small number of variables. A unique feature of our approach is that a compact surface F with boundary properly embedded in a non-compact 3-manifold M with an ideal triangulation with torus cusps can be represented by a normal surface in M as follows. A half-open annulus made up of an infinite number of triangular disks is attached to each boundary component of F. The resulting surface , when normalized, will contain only a finite number of Q-disks and thus correspond to an admissible solution to the system of Q-matching equations. The correspondence is bijective.

Keywords

3-manifoldnormal surfaceknot

MSC classification

Secondary: 57M99: None of the above, but in this section 57M10: Covering spaces
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society , Volume 78 , Issue 3 , June 2005 , pp. 305 - 321
Copyright
Copyright © Australian Mathematical Society 2005

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