Small 3-manifolds of large genus (Q1421751)

A \(3\)-manifold is said to be small if it is irreducible and contains no closed incompressible surface which is not boundary parallel. For example, Thurston showed that most Dehn surgeries on the figure-eight knot yield small \(3\)-manifolds. This is also true for \(2\)-bridge knots. These all have Heegaard genus two. From punctured torus bundles, we can obtain many closed small \(3\)-manifolds of Heegaard genus three by Dehn filling. This appears to be the largest known genus of a small \(3\)-manifold in the literature. In this paper, the author shows the existence of pure braids in \(S^2\times S^1\) with arbitrarily many strands whose complements contain no closed incompressible surface other than boundary tori, in answer to a question of Alan Reid. This is done by large Dehn twists on horizontal loops, controlled by a sequence of pants decompositions of \(\Sigma\), in some mapping torus on the punctured sphere \(\Sigma\). This implies the existence of small closed \(3\)-manifolds of arbitrarily large Heegaard genus.