Rectangle condition for compression body and 2-fold branched covering

Abstract

We give the rectangle condition for strong irreducibility of Heegaard splittings of $3$-manifolds with non-empty boundary. We apply this to a generalized Heegaard splitting of a $2$-fold covering of $S^3$ branched along a link. The condition implies that any thin meridional level surface in the link complement is incompressible. We also show that the additivity of knot width holds for a composite knot satisfying the condition.