Non ambiguous structures on 3-manifolds and quantum symmetry defects

TL;DR

This paper introduces non-ambiguous structures on 3-manifolds and shows how they lead to invariants called symmetry defects and reduced quantum hyperbolic invariants, which can distinguish different taut structures and fibrations.

Contribution

The paper defines non-ambiguous structures on 3-manifolds and demonstrates their role in creating new invariants that distinguish taut structures and fibrations.

Findings

Symmetry defects are invariants on their own for manifolds with non-ambiguous structures.

Reduced QHI can distinguish taut structures associated with different fibrations.

Symmetry defects behave well on taut structures derived from mapping tori and sutured hierarchies.

Abstract

The state sums defining the quantum hyperbolic invariants (QHI) of hyperbolic oriented cusped $3$-manifolds can be split in a "symmetrization" factor and a "reduced" state sum. We show that these factors are invariants on their own, that we call "symmetry defects" and "reduced QHI", provided the manifolds are endowed with an additional "non ambiguous structure", a new type of combinatorial structure that we introduce in this paper. A suitably normalized version of the symmetry defects applies to compact $3$-manifolds endowed with $PSL_2(\mathbb{C})$-characters, beyond the case of cusped manifolds. Given a manifold $M$ with non empty boundary, we provide a partial "holographic" description of the non-ambiguous structures in terms of the intrinsic geometric topology of $\partial M$. Special instances of non ambiguous structures can be defined by means of taut triangulations, and the symmetry defects have a particularly nice behaviour on such "taut structures". Natural examples of taut structures are carried by any mapping torus with punctured fibre of negative Euler characteristic, or by sutured manifold hierarchies. For a cusped hyperbolic $3$-manifold $M$ which fibres over $S^1$, we address the question of determining whether the fibrations over a same fibered face of the Thurston ball define the same taut structure. We describe a few examples in detail. In particular, they show that the symmetry defects or the reduced QHI can distinguish taut structures associated to different fibrations of $M$. To support the guess that all this is an instance of a general behaviour of state sum invariants of 3-manifolds based on some theory of 6j-symbols, finally we describe similar results about reduced Turaev-Viro invariants.