Seifert Fiber Space - Definition

Definition

A Seifert manifold is a closed 3-manifold together with a decomposition into a disjoint union of circles (called fibers) such that each fiber has a tubular neighborhood that forms a standard fibered torus.

A standard fibered torus corresponding to a pair of coprime integers (a,b) with a>0 is the surface bundle of the automorphism of a disk given by rotation by an angle of 2πb/a (with the natural fibering by circles). If a = 1 the middle fiber is called ordinary, while if a>1 the middle fiber is called exceptional. A compact Seifert fiber space has only a finite number of exceptional fibers.

The set of fibers forms a 2-dimensional orbifold, denoted by B and called the base -also called the orbit surface- of the fibration. It has an underlying 2-dimensional surface B₀, but may have some special orbifold points corresponding to the exceptional fibers.

The definition of Seifert fibration can be generalized in several ways. The Seifert manifold is often allowed to have a boundary (also fibered by circles, so it is a union of tori). When studying non-orientable manifolds, it is sometimes useful to allow fibers to have neighborhoods that look like the surface bundle of a reflection (rather than a rotation) of a disk, so that some fibers have neighborhoods looking like fibered Klein bottles, in which case there may be one-parameter families of exceptional curves. In both of these cases, the base B of the fibration usually has a non-empty boundary.