[Math] Classification of homology 3-spheres

3-manifoldsgt.geometric-topology

Is there some general description of all homology 3-spheres?

Best Answer

Certainly. There's a general description of all compact 3-manifolds now that geometrization is about.

So for homology 3-sphere's you have the essentially unique connect sum decomposition into primes.

A prime homology 3-sphere has unique splice decomposition (Larry Siebenmann's terminology). The splice decomposition is just a convenient way of encoding the JSJ-decomposition. The tori of the JSJ-decomposition cut the manifold into components that are atoroidal, so you form a graph corresponding to these components (as vertices) and the tori as edges.

The splice decomposition you can think of as tree where the vertices are decorated by pairs (M,L) where M is a homology 3-sphere and L is a link in M such that M \ L is an atoroidal manifold.

By geometrization there's not many candidates for pairs (M,L). The seifert-fibred homology spheres that come up this way are the Brieskorn spheres, in that case L will be a collection of fibres in the Seifert fibering. Or the pair (M,L) could be a hyperbolic link in a homology sphere. That's a pretty big class of manifolds for which there aren't quite as compact a description, compared to, say, Brieskorn spheres.

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