Haken Manifold - Haken Hierarchy

Haken Hierarchy

We will consider only the case of orientable Haken manifolds, as this simplifies the discussion; a regular neighborhood of an orientable surface in an orientable 3-manifold is just a "thickened up" version of the surface, i.e. a trivial I-bundle. So the regular neighborhood is a 3-dimensional submanifold with boundary containing two copies of the surface.

Given an orientable Haken manifold M, by definition it contains an orientable, incompressible surface S. Take the regular neighborhood of S and delete its interior from M. In effect, we've cut M along the surface S. (This is analogous, in one less dimension, to cutting a surface along a circle or arc.) It is a theorem that any orientable compact manifold with a boundary component that is not a sphere has an infinite first homology group, which implies that it has a properly embedded 2-sided non-separating incompressible surface, and so is again a Haken manifold. Thus, we can pick another incompressible surface in M', and cut along that. If eventually this sequence of cutting results in a manifold whose pieces (or components) are just 3-balls, we call this sequence a hierarchy.