Related papers: Standard position for surfaces in link complements…
It has been known for several decades that classical alternating links in the 3-sphere have nice hyperbolic geometric properties. Recent work generalises such results to give hyperbolic geometry of links with alternating projections onto…
It is natural to ask how many isotopy classes of embedded essential surfaces lie in a given 3-manifold. The first bounds on the number of such surfaces were exponential, using normal surfaces. More recently, by restricting to alternating…
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…
We consider links that are alternating on surfaces embedded in a compact 3-manifold. We show that under mild restrictions, the complement of the link decomposes into simpler pieces, generalising the polyhedral decomposition of alternating…
We show that there exists a transverse link in the standard contact structures on the 3-sphere such that all contact 3-manifolds are contact branched covers over this transverse link.
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,…
Menasco showed that a closed surface in the complement of a non-split prime alternating link in $S^3$ contains a circle isotopic in the link complement to a meridian of the links. This result is known as the meridian lemma for alternating…
In this paper the author provides a generalization of classical linkage, i.e. linkage by a complete intersection, in a different context. Namely she looks at residuals in the scheme theoretic intersection of a rational normal surface or…
Menasco showed that a non-split, prime, alternating link that is not a 2-braid is hyperbolic in $S^3$. We prove a similar result for links in closed thickened surfaces $S \times I$. We define a link to be fully alternating if it has an…
In this article, we consider alternating knots on a closed surface in the 3-sphere, and show that these are not parallel to any closed surface disjoint from the prescribed one.
By use of a variety of techniques (most based on constructions of quasipositive knots and links, some old and others new), many smooth 3-manifolds are realized as transverse intersections of complex surfaces in complex 3-space with strictly…
We show that given a trivalent graph in $S^3$, either the graph complement contains an essential almost meridional planar surface or thin position for the graph is also bridge position. This can be viewed as an extension of a theorem of…
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…
In this paper we study isotopy classes of closed connected orientable surfaces in the standard $3$-sphere. Such a surface splits the $3$-sphere into two compact connected submanifolds, and by using their Heegaard splittings, we obtain a…
Menasco proved that nontrivial links in the 3-sphere with connected prime alternating non-2-braid projections are hyperbolic. This was further extended to augmented alternating links wherein non-isotopic trivial components bounding disks…
In this paper, we characterize non-hyperbolic 3-component links in the 3-sphere whose exteriors contain essential 3-punctured spheres with non-integral boundary slopes. We also show the existence of embeddings of some multibranched surfaces…
We define a 2-normal surface to be one which intersects every 3-simplex of a triangulated 3-manifold in normal triangles and quadrilaterals, with one or two exceptions. The possible exceptions are a pair of octagons, a pair of unknotted…
Triple linking numbers were defined for 3-component oriented surface-links in 4-space using signed triple points on projections in 3-space. In this paper we give an algebraic formulation using intersections of homology classes (or cup…
Extending the notion of monodromies associated with open books of $3$-manifolds, we consider monodromies for all incompressible surfaces in $3$-manifolds as partial self-maps of the arc set of the surfaces. We use them to develop a…
We study a canonical spanning surface obtained from a knot or link diagram depending on a given Kauffman state, and give a sufficient condition for the surface to be essential. By using the essential surface, we can see the triviality and…