Stable existence of incompressible 3-manifolds in 4-manifolds

Abstract

Given an injective amalgam at the level of fundamental groups and a specific 3-manifold, is there a corresponding geometric-topological decomposition of a given 4-manifold, in a stable sense? We find an algebraic-topological splitting criterion in terms of the orientation classes and universal covers. Also, we equivariantly generalize the Lickorish--Wallace theorem to regular covers.