Triangulations of 3–Manifolds with essential edges

Abstract

We define essential and strongly essential triangulations of 3 –manifolds, and give four constructions using different tools (Heegaard splittings, hierarchies of Haken 3–manifolds, Epstein-Penner decompositions, and cut loci of Riemannian manifolds) to obtain triangulations with these properties under various hypotheses on the topology or geometry of the manifold. We also show that a semi-angle structure is a sufficient condition for a triangulation of a 3–manifold to be essential, and a strict angle structure is a sufficient condition for a triangulation to be strongly es..