Abstract:
The surface map arising from a random walk on the mapping class group may be used as the gluing map for a Heegaard splitting, and the resulting 3-manifold is known as a random Heegaard splitting. We show that the splitting distance of random Heegaard splittings grows linearly in the length of the random walk, with an exponential decay estimate for the proportion with slower growth. We use this to obtain the limiting distribution of Casson invariants of random Heegaard splittings.
We acknowledge support by ERC, NSF and ISF. The second author was supported by PSC-CUNY award TRADB-45-17 and Simons Foundation grant CGM 234477. The third author was supported by NSF grant DMS-1006553, and thanks GARE network and the warm hospitality of Hebrew University.
Citation:
Alexander Lubotzky, Joseph Maher, Conan Wu, “Random methods in 3-manifold theory”, Algebra, geometry, and number theory, Collected papers. Dedicated to Academician Vladimir Petrovich Platonov on the occasion of his 75th birthday, Trudy Mat. Inst. Steklova, 292, MAIK Nauka/Interperiodica, Moscow, 2016, 124–148; Proc. Steklov Inst. Math., 292 (2016), 118–142