Related papers: Knots with only two strict essential surfaces

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.…

Let K be a tame knot with irreducible exterior M(K) in a closed, connected, orientable 3--manifold Sigma such that pi_1(Sigma) is cyclic. If infinity is not a strict boundary slope, then the diameter of the set of strict boundary slopes of…

We extend the notion of thin multiple Heegaard splittings of a link in a 3-manifold to take into consideration not only compressing disks but also cut-disks for the Heegaard surfaces. We prove that if H is a c-strongly compressible bridge…

Let $T$ be a graph in a compact, orientable 3--manifold $M$ and let $\Gamma$ be a subgraph. $T$ can be placed in bridge position with respect to a Heegaard surface $H$. We show that if $H$ is what we call $(T,\Gamma)$-c-weakly reducible in…

We give a construction of hyperbolic 3-manifolds with rank two fundamental groups and report an experimental search to find such manifolds. Our manifolds are all surface bundles over the circle with genus two surface fiber. For the…

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…

The Kauffman bracket skein module $K(M)$ of a $3$-manifold $M$ is the quotient of the $\mathbb{Q}(A)$-vector space spanned by isotopy classes of links in $M$ by the Kauffman relations. A conjecture of Witten states that if $M$ is closed…

Templates are branched 2-manifolds with semi-flows used to model `chaotic' hyperbolic invariant sets of flows on 3-manifolds. Knotted orbits on a template correspond to those in the original flow. Birman and Williams conjectured that for…

We prove that if two cusped hyperbolic $3$-manifolds admit a regular isomorphism between the profinite completions of their fundamental groups, then they share the same $A$-polynomial and their strongly detected boundary slopes match up.

If M is a manifold with compressible boundary, we analyze essential disks in M, as well as incompressible, but not necessarily boundary incompressible, surfaces in M. We are most interested in the case where M is a handlebody or compression…

We show the existence of an infinite collection of hyperbolic knots where each of which has in its exterior meridional essential planar surfaces of arbitrarily large number of boundary components, or, equivalently, that each of these knots…

We prove that for any non-trivial knot K, infinitely many r-surgeries K(r) along K have a unique surgery description along a knot. Moreover, we show that for any hyperbolic L-space knot K and infinitely many integer slopes n, the manifold…

We prove that in the complement of a highly twisted link, all closed, essential, meridionally incompressible surfaces must have high genus. The genus bound is proportional to the number of crossings per twist region. A similar result holds…

We give several criteria on a closed, oriented 3-manifold that will imply that it is the boundary of a (simply connected) 4-manifold that admits infinitely many distinct smooth structures. We also show that any weakly fillable contact…

We show that the problem of deciding whether a knot in a fixed closed orientable 3-dimensional manifold bounds a surface of genus at most $g$ is in co-NP. This answers a question of Agol, Hass, and Thurston in 2002. Previously, this was…

We give results on when a finitely generated group has only indiscrete embeddings in SL(2,C), with particular reference to 3-manifold groups. For instance if we glue two copies of the figure 8 knot along its torus boundary then the…

We classify topological $4$-manifolds with boundary and fundamental group $\mathbb{Z}$, under some assumptions on the boundary. We apply this to classify surfaces in simply-connected $4$-manifolds with $S^3$ boundary, where the fundamental…

We establish results concerning the profinite completions of 3-manifold groups. In particular, we prove that the complement of the figure-eight knot $S^3-K$ is distinguished from all other compact 3-manifolds by the set of finite quotients…

We establish a criterion that ensures a bounded almost complex curve in a bounded almost complex 4-manifold minimizes genus amongst all smooth surfaces that share its homology class and the transverse link on its boundary. An immediate…

In this paper, we use normal surface theory to study Dehn filling on a knot-manifold. First, it is shown that there is a finite computable set of slopes on the boundary of a knot-manifold that bound normal and almost normal surfaces in a…