Paper detail

On invariants of surfaces in the $3$-sphere

In this paper we study isotopy classes of closed connected orientable surfaces in the standard $3$-sphere. Such a surface splits the $3$-sphere into two compact connected submanifolds, and by using their Heegaard splittings, we obtain a $2$-component handlebody-link. In this paper, we first show that the equivalence class of such a 2-component handlebody-link up to attaching trivial $1$-handles can recover the original surface. Therefore, we can reduce the study of surfaces in the $3$-sphere to that of $2$-component handlebody-links up to stabilizations. Then, by using $G$-families of quandles, we construct invariants of $2$-component handlebody-links up to attaching trivial $1$-handles, which lead to invariants of surfaces in the $3$-sphere. In order to see the effectiveness of our invariants, we will also show that our invariants can distinguish certain explicit surfaces in the $3$-sphere.