Many Haken Heegaard splittings

Abstract

We give a simple criterion for a Heegaard splitting to yield a Haken manifold. As a consequence, we construct many Haken manifolds, in particular homology spheres, with prescribed properties, namely Heegaard genus, Heegaard distance and Casson invariant. Along the way we give simpler and shorter proofs of the existence of splittings with specified Heegaard distance, originally proven by Ido–Jang–Kobayashi, of the existence of hyperbolic manifolds with prescribed Casson invariant, originally due to Lubotzky–Maher–Wu, and of a result about subsurface projections of disc sets (for which we even get better constants), originally due to Masur–Schleimer.