Veering branched surfaces, surgeries, and geodesic flows

Abstract

We introduce veering branched surfaces as a dual way of studying veering triangulations. We then discuss some surgical operations on veering branched surfaces. Using these, we provide explicit constructions of some veering branched surfaces whose dual veering triangulations correspond to geodesic flows of negatively curved surfaces. We construct these veering branched surfaces on (i) complements of Montesinos links whose double branched covers are unit tangent bundles of negatively curved orbifolds, and (ii) complements of full lifts of filling geodesics in unit tangent bundles of negatively curved surfaces, when the geodesics have no triple intersections and have ($n \geq 4$)-gons as complementary regions. As an application, this provides explicit Markov partitions of geodesic flows on negatively curved surfaces. In an appendix, we classify the drilled unit tangent bundles which admit a veering triangulation corresponding to a geodesic flow, by characterizing when there are no perfect fits.