Immersed turnovers in hyperbolic 3-orbifolds (Q965092)

A turnover is a \(2\)-dimensional orbifold homeomorphic to the sphere with three cone points. Hyperbolic turnovers are the only nontrivial orientable \(2\)-orbifolds that are rigid in the sense that they admit a unique complete hyperbolic structure. In this paper, the author considers totally geodesic immersions of hyperbolic turnovers into an orientable hyperbolic \(3\)-orbifold such that the image of the immersion does not cover an embedded turnover or embedded triangle with mirrored sides. The main result demonstrates that the image of such an immersion is contained in the ``turnover core'', a hyperbolic \(3\)-suborbifold with totally geodesic boundary whose volume is bounded above by a function that depends only on the area of the given turnover. It follows that if a complete orientable hyperbolic \(3\)-orbifold with a volume of at least \(2\pi\) contains an immersed turnover, then it contains an embedded turnover or an embedded triangle with mirrored sides. Similarly, the author obtains that an immersion of a hyperbolic turnover into a compact, irreducible, orientable, atoroidal \(3\)-orbifold is homotopic into a unique component of the decomposition of \textit{W. D. Dunbar} [Topology Appl. 29, 267--283 (1988; Zbl 0665.57011)] of such a \(3\)-orbifold into pieces which contain no essential embedded turnovers. As a consequence of this, the author concludes that the Dunbar decomposition is the turnover analogue of the JSJ-decomposition of a \(3\)-manifold. As examples, the author studies the case of immersed turnovers with cone points of orders \((2, 4, 5)\); \((2, 4, 6)\); \((2, 4, p)\) for \(p \geq 7\); and turnovers arising from subgroups of tetrahedral groups. In particular, these examples demonstrate that the hypotheses of the main theorem are necessary.