Taut foliations, left-orderability, and cyclic branched covers (Q490035): Difference between revisions

It is conjectured that for an irreducible rational homology 3-sphere \(Y\), the following three conditions are equivalent: (1) \(Y\) is not an L-space, (2) \(Y\) admits a co-oriented taut foliation, and (3) \(\pi_{1}(Y)\) is left-orderable. The authors investigate and confirm this conjecture for various cyclic branched coverings of knots in \(S^{3}\), for the cases of torus knots, cable knots, Whitehead doubles, and some two-bridge or pretzel knots. In the proof, the fact that the conjecture is already confirmed for Seifert fibered manifolds, and glueing techniques (glueing 3-manifolds along their torus boundaries to get a new 3-manifold with co-oriented taut foliation/left-orderable fundamental group) play an important role.