Decomposing Heegaard splittings along separating incompressible surfaces in 3-manifolds

Abstract

In this paper, by putting a separating incompressible surface in a 3-manifold into Morse position relative to the height function associated to a strongly irreducible Heegaard splitting, we show that an incompressible subsurface of the Heegaard splitting can be found, by decomposing the 3-manifold along the separating surface. Further if the Heegaard surface is of Hempel distance at least 4, then there is a pair of such subsurfaces on both sides of the given separating surface. This gives a particularly simple hierarchy for the 3-manifold.