The canonical decomposition of once-punctured torus bundles (Q1405753)

Once-punctured torus bundles over the circle that admit a hyperbolic structure have a natural ideal triangulation constructed by \textit{W. Floyd} and \textit{A. E. Hatcher} [Topology Appl. 13, 263--282 (1982; Zbl 0493.57004)]. A once-punctured torus admits an involution which commutes with every linear homeomorphism of the once-punctured torus; it induces a fiber-preserving involution on any once-punctured torus bundle over the circle and preserves the natural decomposition. The author proves that any ideal polyhedral decomposition of a hyperbolic once-punctured torus bundle that is straight in the hyperbolic structure and invariant under the fiber-preserving involution is equivariantly isotopic to the natural ideal triangulation. In fact he proves the theorem for angled polyhedral decompositions which are more general than straight ideal polyhedral decompositions. The techniques involve Gabai's thin position and Rubinstein's almost normal surface theory.