Special moves for open book decompositions of 3-manifolds

Riccardo Piergallini, Daniele Zuddas

Published 2018-01-05Version 1

We provide a complete set of two moves that suffice to relate any two open book decompositions of a given 3-manifold. One of the moves is the usual plumbing with a positive or negative Hopf band, while the other one is a special local version of Harer's twisting, which is presented in two different (but stably equivalent) forms. Our approach relies on 4-dimensional Lefschetz fibrations, and on 3-dimensional contact topology, via the Giroux-Goodman stable equivalence theorem for open book decompositions representing homologous contact structures.