Genera and minors of multibranched surfaces

Abstract

We say that a $2$-dimensional CW complex is a multibranched surface if we remove all points whose open neighborhoods are homeomorphic to the $2$-dimensional Euclidean space, then we obtain a $1$-dimensional complex which is homeomorphic to a disjoint union of some $S^1$'s. We define the genus of a multibranched surface $X$ as the minimum number of genera of $3$-dimensional manifold into which $X$ can be embedded. We prove some inequalities which give upper bounds for the genus of a multibranched surface. A multibranched surface is a generalization of graphs. Therefore, we can define "minors" of multibranched surfaces analogously. We study various properties of the minors of multibranched surfaces.

23 pages, 16 figures