Rebekah Palmer | Searcharxiv

arXiv2023

Geodesic surfaces in the complement of knots with small crossing number

In this article, we investigate the problem of counting totally geodesic surfaces in the complement of hyperbolic knots with at most 9 crossings. Adapting previous counting techniques of boundary slope and intersection, we establish uniqueness of a totally geodesic surface for the knots $7_4$ and $9_{35}$. Extending an obstruction to the existence of totally geodesic surfaces due to Calegari, we show that there is no totally geodesic surface in the complement of 47 knots.

math.GT↗

arXiv2022

Totally geodesic surfaces in twist knot complements

In this article, we give explicit examples of infinitely many non-commensurable (non-arithmetic) hyperbolic $3$-manifolds admitting exactly $k$ totally geodesic surfaces for any positive integer $k$, answering a question of Bader, Fisher, Miller and Stover. The construction comes from a family of twist knot complements and their dihedral covers. The case $k=1$ arises from the uniqueness of an immersed totally geodesic thrice-punctured sphere, answering a question of Reid. Applying the proof techniques of the main result, we explicitly construct non-elementary maximal Fuchsian subgroups of infinite covolume within twist knot groups, and we also show that no twist knot complement with odd prime half twists is right-angled in the sense of Champanerkar, Kofman, and Purcell.

math.GT↗