Dehn surgery on knots of wrapping number 2 (Q1941815): Difference between revisions

For a hyperbolic knot \(K\) in a compact 3-manifold \(M\), an important problem is to study the Dehn surgeries along \(K\) that produce non-hyperbolic manifolds. These surgeries are called exceptional Dehn surgeries. Due to the Geometrization theorem by Perelman, according to the types of the resulting manifolds, exceptional surgeries are classified into three types: reducing, Seifert fibered and toroidal (and it was conjectured that no hyperbolic manifold admits reducing surgeries). Thurston's hyperbolic Dehn surgery theorem showed that a hyperbolic manifold admits only finitely many exceptional surgeries. The only knots whose complements have more than 6 exceptional surgeries are the figure-eight knot and the \((-2, 3, 7)\) pretzel knot: they have 10 and 7 exceptional surgeries, respectively. Gordon conjectured that 10 is the bound of exceptional surgeries. Another well-known conjecture states that the figure-eight knot and the \((-2, 3, 7)\) pretzel knot are the only knots having more than 6 exceptional surgeries. There are many results investigating the exceptional surgeries, some significant ones are due to the author. In the paper under review, the author studies exceptional Dehn surgeries on wrapping number 2 hyperbolic knots \(K\) in a solid torus \(V\). This reduces to only toroidal or small Seifert fibered surgeries. It is conjectured in this paper that except for only two cases there is at most one such exceptional surgery and it is toroidal. A proof for the conjecture is given in the paper for the case that the winding number of \(K\) is \(0\). So, the Whitehead knot is the only knot that admits more than one exceptional surgery with winding number 0 and wrapping number 2. Let \(K\) be a knot with slope \(r\) in \(V\), then there are infinitely many knots \(K_n\) with slope \(r_n\) obtained from the embeddings of \(V\) in \(S^3\). It is shown in this paper that if \(r\) surgery on \(K\) in \(V\) is toroidal then either the \(K_n (r_n )\) are toroidal for all but at most three \(n\), or they are all atoroidal and nonhyperbolic. Based on this result, a classification of exceptional surgeries on wrapped Montesinos knots in a solid torus is given.