Related papers: Alternating links have representativity 2
We show that if $F$ is a smooth, closed, orientable surface embedded in a closed, orientable 3-manifold $M$ such that for each Riemannian metric $g$ on $M$, $F$ is isotopic to a least-area surface $F(g)$, then $F$ is incompressible.
We prove a Kauffman-Murasugi-Thistlethwaite theorem for alternating links in thickened surfaces. It states that any reduced alternating diagram of a link in a thickened surface has minimal crossing number, and any two reduced alternating…
Examples suggest that there is a correspondence between L-spaces and 3-manifolds whose fundamental groups cannot be left-ordered. In this paper we establish the equivalence of these conditions for several large classes of such manifolds. In…
Since the 1980s, it has been known that essential surfaces in alternating link complements can be isotoped to be transverse to the link diagram almost everywhere, with the exception of some well-understood intersections, and described…
We consider hyperbolic links that admit alternating projections on surfaces in compact, irreducible 3-manifolds. We show that, under some mild hypotheses, the volume of the complement of such a link is bounded below in terms of a Kauffman…
Let L be a link in the 3-sphere that is in thin position but not in bridge position and let P be a thin level sphere. We generalize a result of Wu by giving a bound on the number of disjoint irreducible compressing disks that P can have,…
For any link in the 3-sphere, there is a natural lower bound for the unlinking number in terms of the classical signature. We prove that if this lower bound is sharp for a special alternating link $L$, then the unlinking number of $L$ is…
A classification of spanning surfaces for alternating links is provided up to genus, orientability, and a new invariant that we call aggregate slope. That is, given an alternating link, we determine all possible combinations of genus,…
We announce results about flat (linkless) embeddings of graphs in 3-space. A piecewise-linear embedding of a graph in 3-space is called {\it flat} if every circuit of the graph bounds a disk disjoint from the rest of the graph. We have…
By applying Seifert's algorithm to a special alternating diagram of a link L, one obtains a Seifert surface F of L. We show that the support of the sutured Floer homology of the sutured manifold complementary to F is affine isomorphic to…
Checkerboard surfaces in alternating link complements are used frequently to determine information about the link. However, when many crossings are added to a single twist region of a link diagram, the geometry of the link complement…
Gordon and Litherland showed that all compact, unoriented, possibly non-orientable surfaces in $S^3$ bounded by a link are realted by attaching/deleting tubes and half twisted bands. In this note we give an elementary proof for this result.
We show that if a knot admits a prime, twist-reduced diagram with at least 4 twist regions and at least 6 crossings per twist region, then every non-trivial Dehn filling of that knot is hyperbolike. A similar statement holds for links. We…
Let M be $S^3$, $S^1\times S^2$, or a lens space L(p,q), and let k be a (1,1)-knot in M, i.e., a knot which is of 1-bridge with respect to a Heegaard torus. We show that if there is a closed meridionally incompressible surface in the…
Let c(K;F) denote the surface crossing number of a knot K with respect to a closed connected surface F in S^3. We relate c(K;F) to the tunnel number t(K) and to the Heegaard deficiency delta(F)=g(M_1;F)+g(M_2;F)-g(F), where S^3=M_1 union_F…
We show that any two same-genus, oriented, boundary parallel surfaces bounded by a non-split, alternating link into the 4-ball are smoothly isotopic fixing boundary. In other words, any same-genus Seifert surfaces for a non-split,…
In this paper we describe a procedure for refining the given triangulation of a 3-manifold that scales the PL-metric according to a given weight function while creating no new normal surfaces. It is known that an incompressible surface $F$…
A long standing open conjecture states that if a link $\mathcal{K}$ is alternating, then its ropelength $L(\mathcal{K})$ is at least of the order $O(Cr(\mathcal{K}))$. A recent result shows that the maximum braid index of a link bounds the…
A biperiodic alternating link has an alternating quotient link in the thickened torus. In this paper, we focus on semi-regular links, a class of biperiodic alternating links whose hyperbolic structure can be immediately determined from a…
We prove that a family of links, which includes all special alternating knots, does not admit non-nugatory crossing changes which preserve the isotopy type of the link. Our proof incorporates a result of Lidman and Moore on crossing changes…