Unknotting tunnels in hyperbolic 3-manifolds

Abstract

An unknotting tunnel in a 3-manifold with boundary is a properly embedded arc, the complement of an open neighborhood of which is a handlebody. A geodesic with endpoints on the cusp boundary of a hyperbolic 3-manifold and perpendicular to the cusp boundary is called a vertical geodesic. Given a vertical geodesic in a hyperbolic 3-manifold M, we find sufficient conditions for it to be an unknotting tunnel. In particular, if the vertical geodesic corresponds to a 4-bracelet, 5-bracelet or 6-bracelet in the universal cover and has short enough length, it must be an unknotting tunnel. Furthermore, we consider a vertical geodesic that satisfies the elder sibling property, which means that in the universal cover, every horoball except the one centered at infinity is connected to a larger horoball by a lift of the vertical geodesic. Such a vertical geodesic with length less than ln(2) is then shown to be an unknotting tunnel.