arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Ying-Qing Wu.
Exceptional Dehn surgeries on arborescent knots have been classified except for Seifert fibered surgeries on Montesinos knots of length 3. There are infinitely many of them as it is known that 4n+6 and 4n+7 surgeries on a (-2, 3, 2n+1) pretzel knot are Seifert fibered. It will be shown that there are only finitely many others. A list of 20 surgeries will be given and proved to be Seifert fibered. We conjecture that this is a complete list.
Suppose $K$ is a hyperbolic knot in a solid torus $V$ intersecting a meridian disk $D$ twice. We will show that if $K$ is not the Whitehead knot and the frontier of a regular neighborhood of $K \cup D$ is incompressible in the knot exterior, then $K$ admits at most one exceptional surgery, which must be toroidal. Embedding $V$ in $S^3$ gives infinitely many knots $K_n$ with a slope $r_n$ corresponding to a slope $r$ of $K$ in $V$. If $r$ surgery on $K$ in $V$ is toroidal then either all but at most three $K_n(r_n)$ are toroidal, or they are all reducible or small Seifert fibered with two common singular fiber indices. These will be used to classify exceptional surgeries on wrapped Montesinos knots in solid torus, obtained by connecting the top endpoints of a Montesinos tangle to the bottom endpoints by two arcs wrapping around the solid torus.
We will use immersed surfaces to study Seifert fibered surgery on Montesinos knots, and show that if $\frac 1{q_1-1} + \frac 1{q_2-1} + \frac 1{q_3-1} \leq 1$ then a Montesinos knot $K(\frac{p_1}{q_1}, \frac{p_2}{q_2}, \frac{p_3}{q_3})$ admits no atoroidal Seifert fibered surgery.
We define sink marks for branched complexes and find conditions for them to determine a branched surface structure. These will be used to construct branched surfaces in knot and tangle complements. We will extend Delman's theorem and prove that a Montesinos knot $K$ of length at least 3 has a persistently laminar branched surface unless it is equivalent to $K(1/2q_1,\, 1/q_2,\, 1/q_3,\, -1)$ for some positive integers $q_i$. In most cases these branched surfaces are genuine, in which case $K$ admits no atoroidal Seifert fibered surgery. It will also be shown that there are many persistently laminar tangles.
Exceptional Dehn surgeries have been classified for 2-bridge knots and Montesinos knots of length at least 4. In this paper we classify all toroidal Dehn surgeries on Montesinos knots of length 3.
Abby Thompson proved that if a link $K$ is in thin position but not in bridge position then the knot complement contains an essential meridional planar surface, and she asked whether some thin level surface must be essential. This note is to give a positive answer to this question, showing that the if a link is in thin position but not bridge position then a thinnest level surface is essential. A theorem of Rieck and Sedgwick follows as a consequence, which says that thin position of a connected sum of small knots comes in the obvious way.
A regular $n$-gon inscribing a knot is a sequence of $n$ points on a knot, such that the distances between adjacent points are all the same. It is shown that any smooth knot is inscribed by a regular $n$-gon for any $n$.
Let $K= K(w,b,t)$ be a 1-bridge braid in a solid torus $V$, and let $γ$ be a $(p,q)$ curve on the torus $T = \partial V$ of the exterior $M_K$ of $K$. It will be shown that Dehn filling on $T$ along $γ$ produces a solid torus if and only if $p$ and $q$ satisfy one of four conditions determined by the parameters $(w,b,t)$ of the knot $K$. This solves the classification problem raised by Menasco and Zhang for such Dehn fillings.
A Dehn surgery on a knot $K$ in $S^3$ is exceptional if it produces a reducible, toroidal or Seifert fibred manifold. It is known that a large arborescent knot admits no such surgery unless it is a type II arborescent knot. The main theorem of this paper shows that up to isotopy there are exactly three large arborescent knots admitting exceptional surgery, each of which admits exactly one exceptional surgery, producing a toroidal manifold.
Let $F$ be a closed essential surface in a hyperbolic 3-manifold $M$ with a toroidal cusp $N$. The depth of $F$ in $N$ is the maximal distance from points of $F$ in $N$ to the boundary of $N$. It will be shown that if $F$ is an essential pleated surface which is not coannular to the boundary torus of $N$ then the depth of $F$ in $N$ is bounded above by a constant depending only on the genus of $F$. The result is used to show that an immersed closed essential surface in $M$ which is not coannular to the torus boundary components of $M$ will remain essential in the Dehn filling manifold $M(γ)$ after excluding $C_g$ curves from each torus boundary component of $M$, where $C_g$ is a constant depending only on the genus $g$ of the surface.
We determine all hyperbolic 3-manifolds $M$ admitting two toroidal Dehn fillings at distance 4 or 5. We show that if $M$ is a hyperbolic 3-manifold with a torus boundary component $T_0$, and $r,s$ are two slopes on $T_0$ with $Δ(r,s) = 4$ or 5 such that $M(r)$ and $M(s)$ both contain an essential torus, then $M$ is either one of 14 specific manifolds $M_i$, or obtained from $M_1, M_2, M_3$ or $M_{14}$ by attaching a solid torus to $\partial M_i - T_0$. All the manifolds $M_i$ are hyperbolic, and we show that only the first three can be embedded into $S^3$. As a consequence, this leads to a complete classification of all hyperbolic knots in $S^3$ admitting two toroidal surgeries with distance at least 4.
We will classify all exceptional Dehn surgeries on 2-bridge knots according to whether they produce reducible, toroidal, or small Seifert fibered manifolds.
We generalize a theorem of Finkelstein and Moriah and show that if a link $L$ has a $2n$-plat projection satisfying certain conditions, then its complement contains some closed essential surfaces. In most cases these surfaces remain essential after any totally nontrivial surgery on $L$.
We prove a conjecture of Menasco and Zhang that if a tangle is completely tubing compressible then it consists of at most two families of parallel strands. This is related to problems of graphs in 3-manifold. A 1-vertex graph $Γ$ in a 3-manifold $M$ with a genus 1 Heegaard splitting is standard if it consists of one or two parallel sets of core curves lying in the Heegaard splitting solid tori of $M$ in the standard way. The above conjecture then follows from the theorem which says that a 1-vertex graph in $M$ is standard if and only if the exteriors of all its nontrivial subgraphs are handlebodies.
We show that if a simple 3-manifold $M$ has two Dehn fillings at distance $Δ\geq 4$, each of which contains an essential annulus, then $M$ is one of three specific 2-component link exteriors in $S^3$. One of these has such a pair of annular fillings with $Δ= 5$, and the other two have pairs with $Δ= 4$.
Let $F$ be a proper essential immersed surface in a hyperbolic 3-manifold $M$ with boundary disjoint from a torus boundary component $T$ of $M$. Let $α$ be the set of coannular slopes of $F$ on $T$. The main theorem of the paper shows that there is a constant $K$ and a finite set of slopes $Λ$ on $T$, such that if $β$ is a slope on $T$ with $Δ(β, α_i) > K$ for all $α_i$ in $α$, and $β$ is not in $Λ$, then $F$ remains incompressible after Dehn filling on $T$ along the slope $β$. In certain sense, this means that $F$ survives most Dehn fillings. The proof uses minimal surface theory, integral of differential forms, and properties of geometrically finite groups. As a consequence of our method, it will also be shown that Freedman tubings of immersed geometrically finite surfaces are essential if the tubes are long enough.
Steinhaus conjectured that every closed oriented $C^1$-curve has a pair of anti-parallel tangents. Porter disproved the conjecture by showing that there exist curves with no anti-parallel tangents. Colin Adams rised the question of whether there exists a nontrivial knot in $\R^3$ which has no parallel or antiparallel tangents. The main result of this paper solves this problem, showing that any (smooth or polygonal) link $L$ in $\R^3$ is isotopic to a smooth link $\hat L$ which has no parallel or antiparallel tangents.
We will develop various methods, some are of geometric nature and some are of algebraic nature, to detect the various achiralities of knots and links in $S^3$. For example, we show that the twisted Whitehead double of a knot is achiral if and only if the double is the unknot or the figure eight knot, and we show that all non-trivial links with $\leq9$ crossings are not achiral except the Borromean rings. A simple procedure for calculating the $η$-function is given in terms of a crossing change formula and its initial values.