Determining incompressibility of surfaces in alternating knot and link complements

Essential Twisted Surfaces in Alternating Link Complements

Checkerboard surfaces in alternating link complements are used frequently to determine information about the link. However, when many crossings are added to a single twist region of a link diagram, the geometry of the link complement stabilizes (approaches a geometric limit), but a corresponding checkerboard surface increases in complexity with crossing number. In this paper, we generalize chec...

Geodesic Surfaces in Knot Complements

C-incompressible Planar Surfaces in Knot Complements

In [6] Wu shows that if a link or a knot L in S3 in thin position has thin spheres, then the thin sphere of lowest width is an essential surface in the link complement. In this paper we show that if we further assume that L ⊂ S3 is prime, then the thin sphere of lowest width also does not have any cut-disks. We also prove an analogous result for a specific kind of tangles in

Non-parallel Essential Surfaces in Knot Complements

We show that if a knot or link has n thin levels when put in thin position then its exterior contains a collection of n disjoint, non-parallel, planar, meridional, essential surfaces. A corollary is that there are at least n/3 tetrahedra in any triangulation of the complement of such a knot.

Incompressible surfaces in 2-bridge knot complements

To each rational number p/q, with q odd, there is associated the 2-bridge knot Kp/q shown in Fig. 1. QI bl Fig. 1. The 2-bridge knot Kp/q In (a), the central grid consists of lines of slope +p/q, which one can imagine as being drawn on a square "pillowcase". In (b) this "pillowcase" is punctured and flattened out onto a plane, making the two "bridges" more evident. The knot drawn is K3/5, which...