Finding disjoint incompressible spanning surfaces for a link (Q1202217)

It is known that a link in the 3-sphere can admit infinitely many inequivalent incompressible or minimal genus spanning surfaces (for example a composite knot of two non-fibred knots, by results of Eisner). In the present paper, to each link \(L\) two simplicial complexes are associated whose vertex sets are the sets of incompressible resp. minimal genus spanning surfaces for \(L\). The main result concerns a distance on these complexes and is used to show that they are connected, generalizing a result of Scharlemann-Thompson in the case of a knot. As applications, the complexes are determined in the case of a composite knot of two non- fibred knots with unique spanning surfaces, and the classification of the incompressible spanning surfaces for all prime knots up to 10 crossings is announced.