Embeddings of 3-manifolds in S^4 from the point of view of the 11-tetrahedron census

Abstract

This is a collection of notes on embedding problems for 3-manifolds. The main question explored is `which 3-manifolds embed smoothly in the 4-sphere?' The terrain of exploration is the Burton/Martelli/Matveev/Petronio census of triangulated prime closed 3-manifolds built from 11 or less tetrahedra. There are 13766 manifolds in the census, of which 13400 are orientable. Of the 13400 orientable manifolds, only 149 of them have hyperbolic torsion linking forms and are thus candidates for embedability in the 4-sphere. The majority of this paper is devoted to the embedding problem for these 149 manifolds. At present 41 are known to embed. Among the remaining manifolds, embeddings into homotopy 4-spheres are constructed for 4. 67 manifolds are known to not embed in the 4-sphere. This leaves 37 unresolved cases, of which only 3 are geometric manifolds i.e. having a trivial JSJ-decomposition.

58 pages, 80+ figures. V6: Included references to libraries valid in Regina 5.0+. Incorporated changes suggested by Ahmed Issa, following from his techniques developed with McCoy. Included a few recent references. To appear in Experimental Mathematics

References in corpus (5)

• Sums of lens spaces bounding rational balls
• A family of embedding spaces
• A classification of smooth embeddings of 3-manifolds in 6-space
• 3-Manifolds with abelian embeddings in $S^4$
• Simplicial structures of knot complements

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• Embedding closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds in small volume hyperbolic 4-manifolds
• Smoothly embedding Seifert fibered spaces in $S^4$
• Embedding Seifert manifolds in S^4
• Embedding lens spaces in definite 4-manifolds