Complexity of geometric three-manifolds

DOI10.1007/S10711-004-3181-XMaRDI QIDQ1768249zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Bruno Martelli, Carlo Petronio

Publication date 15 March 2005

Published in Geometriae Dedicata (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0303249

zbMATH Keywords

3-manifold complexity spine triangulation

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Covering spaces and low-dimensional topology (57M10) General geometric structures on low-dimensional manifolds (57M50)

Abstract: We compute for all orientable irreducible geometric 3-manifolds certain complexity functions that approximate from above Matveev's natural complexity, known to be equal to the minimal number of tetrahedra in a triangulation. We can show that the upper bounds on Matveev's complexity implied by our computations are sharp for thousands of manifolds, and we conjecture they are for infinitely many, including all Seifert manifolds. Our computations and estimates apply to all the Dehn fillings of M6_1^3 (the complement of the three-component chain-link, conjectured to be the smallest triply cusped hyperbolic manifold), whence to infinitely many among the smallest closed hyperbolic manifolds. Our computations are based on the machinery of the decomposition into `bricks' of irreducible manifolds, developed in a previous paper. As an application of our results we completely describe the geometry of all 3-manifolds of complexity up to 9.

Review text

The notion of \textit{complexity} \(c(M)\) for closed orientable 3-manifolds was introduced by \textit{S. V. Matveev} in [Acta Appl. Math. 19, No. 2, 101--130 (1990; Zbl 0724.57012)]. The present paper faces the problem of complexity computation by introducing a sequence \((c_n)_{n=0}^{\infty}\) of functions with values in \(\mathbb N \cup \{\infty\}\) such that, for any given \(M\), the sequence \((c_n(M))_{n=0}^{\infty}\) is non-increasing and has constant value \(c(M)\) for \(n \gg 0\). Note that definition and calculation of \(c_n(M)\) are based on the theory of decomposition of irreducible manifolds into \textit{bricks}, developed by the authors in [Ill. J. Math. 46(3), 755--780 (2002; Zbl 1033.57011)]. The value of \(c_n\), for \(n\leq 9,\) is explicitly computed on all torus bundles over \(\mathbb S^1\), on all Seifert manifolds (except for certain very special ones fibered over the sphere, for which another complexity estimation is defined and computed) and on all hyperbolic Dehn fillings of \(M6^3_1\), i.e. the complement of the chain link \(6^3_1\) with three components. Hence, useful upper bounds on Matveev's complexity are obtained for all orientable irreducible geometric 3-manifolds. As a consequence, the authors refine the main result of \textit{B. Martelli} and \textit{C. Petronio} [Exp. Math. 10(2), 207--236 (2001; Zbl 1050.57018)], determining the exact list and the geometry of all closed orientable irreducible 3-manifolds up to complexity 9.

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