Volumes of Montesinos links (Q5963069)

The hyperbolic volume of a knot complement is a knot invariant. In this paper the authors study the hyperbolic volume of Montesinos links. They show that the volume of any Montesinos link can be bounded above and below in terms of the combinatorics of a particular diagram. This work extends work of \textit{D. Futer} et al. [Guts of surfaces and the colored Jones polynomial. Berlin: Springer (2013; Zbl 1270.57002)] where bounds on the hyperbolic volume are established for Montesinos links with at least three positive tangles (or three negative tangles). Note that this gives automatically bounds on the hyperbolic volume of Montesinos links with at least five tangles. Montesinos links of at most two tangles are two bridge links and therefore alternating. Volumes of alternating links can be bounded as shown in [\textit{M. Lackenby}, Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. (3) 88, No. 1, 204--224 (2004; Zbl 1041.57002)]. This leaves some cases of Montesinos links with three or four tangles, that are not alternating or equivalently where not all the tangles have the same sign. In this article bounds on the hyperbolic volume of a knot complement are obtained for these remaining cases. Let \(v_g \approx 3.6638\) be the hyperbolic volume of a regular ideal octahedron. The main results of the paper that summarizes volume bounds for all Montesinos links are the following: Theorem 1. Let \(K\) be a hyperbolic Montesinos link with a reduced, admissible diagram with at least three tangles. Then \[ \mathrm{vol}(S^3 - K ) \geq v_g (\chi_{-}(G'_{\sigma}) -1). \] Here \(\chi_{-}\) is the negative Euler characteristic, \(G'_{\sigma}\) is the reduced state graph of a reduced diagram \(D(K)\) corresponding to either the all-\(A\) or the all-\(B\) state (defined by the state sum model of the Jones polynomial), depending on whether the diagram of \(K\) admits two or more positive tangles, or two or more negative tangles, respectively. (Note: The definition of \(G'_{\sigma}\) is rather technical and the reader should look at the full article.) Theorem 2. Let \(K\) be a Montesinos link that admits a reduced, admissible diagram with at least two positive tangles and at least two negative tangles, and suppose further that \(K\) is not the \((2,-2, 2, -2)\) pretzel link. Then \(K\) is hyperbolic, and \[ \frac{1}{4}v_g (t(K)-\#K -8)\leq \mathrm{vol}(S^3 - K) \leq 2v_g t(K), \] where \(t(K)\) is the twist number of the diagram, and \(\#K\) is the number of link components of \(K\).