Taut Sutured Handlebodies as Twisted Homology Products

Friedl and Kim show any taut sutured manifold can be realized as a twisted homology product, but their proof gives no practical description of how complicated the realizing representation needs to be. In this thesis, we give a number of results illustrating the relationship between the topology of a taut sutured handlebody and the complexity of a representation realizing it as a homology product.