Meier's conjecture on trisections of the 4-sphere

Let a trisection of a smooth, closed, connected 44-manifold be a decomposition into three 44-dimensional 11-handlebodies meeting pairwise in 33-dimensional handlebodies and all three in a closed surface. The standard (0,0)(0,0)-trisection is the genus-zero trisection of S4S^4, and a stabilization is the standard operation that increases the trisection genus while preserving the underlying 44-manifold.

Meier's conjecture. Every trisection of S4S^4 is either the (0,0)(0,0)-trisection or a stabilization of the (0,0)(0,0)-trisection.

This is a trisection-theoretic analogue of the assertion that all decompositions of the 44-sphere are standard up to stabilization. The conjecture is presented as a specific case of the question about whether trisections arising from the Price-twist algorithm are stabilized, and its general status is not resolved in the supplied text.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Seungwon Kim and Maggie Miller, “Trisections of surface complements and the Price twist”, arXiv:1805.00429 (2019).

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