Immersing almost geodesic surfaces in a closed hyperbolic three manifold (Q431639)

This is a very important paper. The authors show that for any closed hyperbolic 3-manifold and any 2-frame in the manifold, there is an immersed incompressible closed surface which is nearly totally geodesic and nearly tangent to the given frame. This implies in particular, combined with the geometrisation theorem proved by Perelman, that any closed irreducible 3-manifold with infinite fundamental group contains an immersed incompressible surface, which is an affirmative solution of a more than 40-year-old conjecture by Waldhausen. Also, using the result of this paper and work on cube complexes and right-angled Artin groups by Bergeron, Haglund, Sageev, and Wise, recently Agol resolved two famous conjectures in 3-manifold topology, the virtual Haken conjecture and virtual fibre conjecture, the former of which was posed also by Waldhausen and the latter of which was posed by Thurston. The authors construct immersed closed surfaces by pasting up pairs of pants with totally geodesic boundaries in a hyperbolic 3-manifold \(M\), which they call skew pants. To form an immersed closed surface from skew pants, information on how to match them up is necessary. The authors give such information by translating it into labelling and ``an admissible involution'' on the set of labels. This labelling is in turn obtained by approximating a Borel measure with compact support and rational values on the space of skew pants (with the discrete topology). This measure is constructed by defining a measure on the self-direct product of the space of ``tripods'' of frames in \(M\), by measuring the affinity of two frames after travelling a long distance along geodesics, and then turn the values into rationals keeping the required conditions. Using the mixing property of the geodesic flow on a hyperbolic 3-manifold, it is shown that this measure induces a measure on the disjoint union of the unit normal bundles of (half) closed geodesics which is ``close'' to the ordinary Lebesgue measure. This last property guarantees that such nearly geodesic immersed closed incompressible surfaces are ``ubiquitous''.