Toroidal and boundary-reducing Dehn fillings (Q1292719)

In recent years, thanks in large part to ideas developed by the authors, substantial progress has been made in understanding the incompressible surfaces that arise when Dehn filling is performed on a torus boundary component of a \(3\)-manifold. In this paper, the authors resolve a particular case for which the best possible result had not been previously obtained. Start with a \(3\)-manifold \(M\) with a torus boundary component \(T\), and suppose that \(M\) contains no essential sphere, disc, torus, or annulus. Let \(M(\gamma)\) and \(M(\delta)\) be the manifolds that result from Dehn filling \(T\) along two boundary slopes \(\gamma\) and \(\delta\) (i.~e.~two simple closed loops in \(T\)), and suppose that \(M(\gamma)\) contains an essential torus and \(M(\delta)\) contains an essential compressing disc. \textit{Y.-Q. Wu} [Topology 37, No. 1, 95-108 (1998; Zbl 0886.57012)] proved that the minimal geometric intersection number \(\Delta(\gamma, \delta)\) is at most \(3\). \textit{K. Miyazaki} and \textit{K. Motegi} [Toroidal and annular Dehn surgeries of solid tori, Topology Appl. 93, No. 2, 173-178 (1999)] gave examples having \(\Delta(\gamma,\delta)=2\). In the paper under review, the authors use arguments and techniques endemic to the subject to prove that \(\Delta(\gamma,\delta)\leq 2\) in general.