Related papers: Repeated boundary slopes for 2-bridge knots
For a given knot, we study the minimal number of positive eigenvalues of the double branched cover over spanning surfaces for the knot. The value gives a lower bound for various genera, the dealternating number and the alternation number of…
We give infinitely many examples of 2-bridge knots for which the topological and smooth slice genera differ. The smallest of these is the 12-crossing knot $12a255$. These also provide the first known examples of alternating knots for which…
For any given number of crossings $c$, there exists a formula to determine the number of 2-bridge knots of $c$ crossings, and indeed it is a simple matter to actually construct presentations of these knots. However, the determination of…
We show that two-bridge knots and alternating fibered knots admit no purely cosmetic surgeries, i.e., no pair of distinct Dehn surgeries on such a knot produce 3-manifolds that are homeomorphic as oriented manifolds. Our argument, based on…
Whitehead doubles provide a plethora of examples of knots that are topologically slice but not smoothly slice. We discuss the problem of the Whitehead double of the Figure 8 knot and survey commonly used techniques to obstructing sliceness.…
Understanding ideal points in the character varieties of knot complements has led to a number of important invariants for 3-manifolds. Ohtsuki (1994) counted the ideal points for character varieties of 2-bridge knot complements, and he made…
We show that a torus knot which is not 2-bridge has a unique irreducible bridge splitting of positive genus.
We discuss 3-manifolds which are cyclic coverings of the 3-sphere, branched over 2-bridge knots and links. Different descriptions of these manifolds are presented: polyhedral, Heegaard diagram, Dehn surgery and coloured graph constructions.…
Neuwirth asked if any non-trivial knot in the 3-sphere can be embedded in a closed surface so that the complement of the surface is a connected essential surface for the knot complement. In this paper, we examine some variations on this…
If a knot K in a closed, orientable 3-manifold M has a bridge surface T with distance at least 3 in the curve complex of T - K, then the genus of any essential surface in its exterior with non-empty, non-meridional boundary gives rise to an…
We prove a simple necessary and sufficient condition for a two-bridge knot K(p,q) to be quasipositive, based on the continued fraction expansion of p/q. As an application, coupled with some classification results in contact and symplectic…
We show that for certain hyperbolic 3-manifolds, all boundary slopes are slopes of immersed incompressible surfaces, covered by incompressible embeddings in some finite cover. The manifolds include hyperbolic punctured torus bundles and…
We investigate the negative definite spin fillings of branched double covers of alternating knots. We derive some obstructions for the existence of such fillings and find a characterization of special alternating knots based on them.
We show that a finite numerical boundary slope of an essential surface in the exterior of a Montesinos knot is bounded above and below in terms of the numbers of positive/negative crossings of a specific minimal diagram of the knot.
Each ruling of a Legendrian link can be naturally treated as a surface. For knots, the ruling is 2-graded if and only if the surface is orientable. For 2-graded rulings of homogeneous (in particular, alternating) knots, we prove that the…
We present a new, practical algorithm to test whether a knot complement contains a closed essential surface. This property has important theoretical and algorithmic consequences; however, systematically testing it has until now been…
It is well known that there exist knots with Seifert surfaces of arbitrarily high genus. In this paper, we show the existence of infinitely many knot exteriors where each of which has longitudinal essential surfaces of any positive genus…
Using the techniques on annulus twists, we observe that $6_3$ has infinitely many non-characterizing slopes, which affirmatively answers a question by Baker and Motegi. Furthermore, we prove that the knots $6_2$, $6_3$, $7_6$, $7_7$, $8_1$,…
We consider homologically essential simple closed curves on Seifert surfaces of genus one knots in $S^3$, and in particular those that are unknotted or slice in $S^3$. We completely characterize all such curves for most twist knots: they…
We study knots in $\mathbb{S}^3$ obtained by the intersection of a minimal surface in $\mathbb{R}^4$ with a small 3-sphere centered at a branch point. We construct examples of new minimal knots. In particular we show the existence of…