English

Characterizing slopes for torus knots

Geometric Topology 2014-10-01 v2

Abstract

A slope pq\frac pq is called a characterizing slope for a given knot K0K_0 in S3S^3 if whenever the pq\frac pq-surgery on a knot KK in S3S^3 is homeomorphic to the pq\frac pq-surgery on K0K_0 via an orientation preserving homeomorphism, then K=K0K=K_0. In this paper we try to find characterizing slopes for torus knots Tr,sT_{r,s}. We show that any slope pq\frac pq which is larger than the number 30(r21)(s21)67\frac{30(r^2-1)(s^2-1)}{67} is a characterizing slope for Tr,sT_{r,s}. The proof uses Heegaard Floer homology and Agol--Lackenby's 6--Theorem. In the case of T5,2T_{5,2}, we obtain more specific information about its set of characterizing slopes by applying more Heegaard Floer homology techniques.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1206.5577,
  title  = {Characterizing slopes for torus knots},
  author = {Yi Ni and Xingru Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1206.5577},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

Version 2: 19 pages. This is a major revision. The title of the first version was "Towards a Dehn surgery characterization of $T_{5,2}$". We extended the result in the first version to general torus knots. We also fixed a gap in the first version, so our result for $T_{5,2}$ is slightly weaker than the originally claimed one

R2 v1 2026-06-21T21:24:46.357Z