Construction of spines of two-bridge link complements and upper bounds of their Matveev complexities (Q330671): Difference between revisions

The notion of complexity was introduced by S. Matveev in 1990. This is now known as the Matveev complexity, and it is a very important invariant for 3-manifolds in geometric topology. But determining the Matveev complexity of a given 3-manifold is quite difficult in general. Thus, providing sharp bounds for the Matveev complexities of 3-manifolds is an important problem. In fact, many authors worked on this. In particular, Petronio and Vesnin gave a certain lower bound for the Matveev complexity of a two-bridge link complement. In this article the authors construct an almost-simple spine of a two-bridge link complement. This naturally gives upper bounds for the Matveev complexities of two-bridge link complements. Then using their construction together with the previous known lower bounds for the Matveev complexity of two-bridge link complements, they are able to determine the complexities for an infinite sequence of two-bridge links corresponding to the continued fractions of the form \([2,1,\dots,1,2]\). They also give upper bounds for the 3-manifolds obtained as meridian-cyclic branched coverings of the 3-sphere along two-bridge links.