Totally geodesic boundaries of knot complements

Finding a totally geodesic surface, an embedded surface where the geodesics in the surface are also geodesics in the surrounding manifold, has been a problem of interest in the study of 3-manifolds. This has especially been of interest in hyperbolic 3-manifolds and knot complements, complements of piecewise-linearly embedded circles in the 3-sphere. This is due to Menasco-Reid's conjecture stating that hyperbolic knot complements do not contain such surfaces. Here, we present...

In 1978, W. Thurston revolutionized low diemsional topology with his work on hyperbolic 3-manifolds. In this paper, we discuss what is currently known about knots in the 3-sphere with hyperbolic complements. Then focus is on geometric invariants coming out of the hyperbolic structures. This is one of a collection of articles to appear in the Handbook of Knot Theory.

We show that some hyperbolic 3-manifolds which are tessellated by copies of the regular ideal hyperbolic tetrahedron embed geodesically in a complete, finite volume, hyperbolic 4-manifold. This allows us to prove that the complement of the figure-eight knot geometrically bounds a complete, finite volume hyperbolic 4-manifold. This the first example of geometrically bounding hyperbolic knot complement and, amongst known examples of geometrically bounding manifolds, the one wit...

The first examples of totally geodesic Seifert surfaces are constructed for hyperbolic knots and links, including both free and totally knotted surfaces. Then it is proved that two bridge knot complements cannot contain totally geodesic orientable surfaces.

We generalize the results of [AS], finding large classes of totally geodesic Seifert surfaces in hyperbolic knot and link complements, each the lift of a rigid 2-orbifold embedded in some hyperbolic 3-orbifold. In addition, we provide a uniqueness theorem and demonstrate that many knots cannot possess totally geodesic Seifert surfaces by giving bounds on the width invariant in the presence of such a surface. Finally, we utilize these examples to demonstrate that the Six Theor...

We construct examples of hyperbolic rational homology spheres and hyperbolic knot complements in rational homology spheres containing closed embedded totally geodesic surfaces.

We prove that any complete hyperbolic 3--manifold with finitely generated fundamental group, with a single topological end, and which embeds into $\BS^3$ is the geometric limit of a sequence of hyperbolic knot complements in $\BS^3$. In particular, we derive the existence of hyperbolic knot complements which contain balls of arbitrarily large radius. We also show that a complete hyperbolic 3--manifold with two convex cocompact ends cannot be a geometric limit of knot compleme...

A 4-manifold is constructed with some curious metric properties; or maybe it is many 4-manifolds masquerading as one, which would explain why it looks curious. Anyway, knots in the 3-sphere with complete finite volume hyperbolic metrics on their complements play a role in this story.

In a paper of Menasco and Reid, it is conjectured that there exist no hyperbolic knots in S^3 for which the complement contains a closed embedded totally geodesic surface. In this note, we show that one can get "as close as possible" to a counter-example. Specifically, we construct a sequence of hyperbolic knots {K_n} with complements containing closed embedded essential surfaces having principal curvatures converging to zero as n tends to infinity. We also construct a family...

We prove that there are compact submanifolds of the 3-sphere whose interiors are not homeomorphic to any geometric limit of hyperbolic knot complements.