The Euler Characteristic of a Haken 4-Manifold

Abstract

Haken n-manifolds are aspherical manifolds, defined and studied by B. Foozwell and H. Rubinstein, that can be successively cut open along essential codimension-one submanifolds until a disjoint union of n-cells is obtained. Such manifolds come equipped with a boundary pattern, a particular kind of decomposition of the boundary into codimension-zero submanifolds. We prove that there is a certain numerical function phi(X^4) depending only on the boundary and boundary pattern of the compact Haken 4-manifold X^4 (and vanishing if X^4 has empty boundary), such that for any compact Haken 4-manifold X^4 the Euler characteristic satisfies the inequality chi(X^4) >= phi(X^4). In particular, if X^{4} is a closed Haken 4-manifold, then chi(X^4) >= 0.