Heegaard splittings and branched coverings of B 3 (Q1092461)

We address the problem of distinguishing the Heegaard splittings of a knot complement in \(S^ 3\). Using ``property P'' for strongly invertible knots, we extend to knot complements a geometric technique developed for closed manifolds by Birman, Hilden, Gonzales-Acuña, and Montesinos. As a lengthy example of our technique, we characterize when two ``obvious'' minimal genus splittings of a two-bridge knot exterior are different. For many two-bridge knots, this can be achieved by examining the Nielsen equivalence classes of the corresponding group presentations. Comparing the results given by these two methods, we show that every amphicheiral two-bridge complement has two inequivalent minimal genus Heegaard splittings with Nielsen equivalent group presentations.