Volume change under drilling (Q1416620)

Given a complete hyperbolic 3-manifold M containing an embedded tubular \(R\)-neighborhood of closed geodesic \(\gamma\), the author estimates the volume of a complete hyperbolic metric on the complement \(M_{\gamma}=M\backslash\gamma\): \[ \text{Vol}(M_{\gamma})\leq (\coth R)^{1/2}(\coth 2R)^{1/2}\text{Vol}(M) . \] As a corollary he shows that the smallest volume orientable hyperbolic 3-manifold has volume \(>0.32\).