A note on reducing spheres for the genus-4 Heegaard surface in the 3-sphere

Abstract

For the genus-$4$ Heegaard surface in the $3$-sphere, we present a sufficient condition for a non-separating weak reducing pair to be separated by a reducing sphere for the surface. As a consequence, we reduce the connectivity problem in the reducing sphere complex for the surface to the problem of showing that any two vertices, whose representative reducing spheres are disjoint from a fixed non-separating compressing disk for the surface, are connected in the complex.

17 pages, 6 figures