Word hyperbolic Dehn surgery (Q1568818)

A weaker group-theoretical version of Thurston's geometrization conjecture for closed orientable 3-manifolds says that the fundamental group of such a 3-manifold either contains \(\mathbb Z \oplus \mathbb Z\) as a subgroup or is word hyperbolic in the sense of Gromov (satisfies a linear isoperimetric inequality). Given a compact 3-manifold whose boundary consists of a finite number of tori and whose interior has a complete hyperbolic structure of finite volume, Thurston's hyperbolic Dehn surgery theorem says that, excluding finitely many so-called exceptional surgery slopes for each boundary torus, Dehn surgery (or Dehn filling) produces again a hyperbolic 3-manifold. Hodgson and Kerckhoff show that there is an upper bound on the number of such exceptional surgeries, independent of the manifold. In the present paper it is shown that most Dehn surgeries on such a manifold yield a 3-manifold which satisfies the following condition: it is irreducible, atoroidal and not Seifert fibered, and has infinite, word hyperbolic fundamental group. The first approach is differential geometric and extends Thurston's and Gromov's \(2\pi\)-theorem stating that, if the Dehn filling slope for each Euclidean cusp torus has length more than \(\pi\), then the resulting manifold has a negatively curved Riemannian metric; in particular, it satisfies the above condition. The first main result of the present paper improves the critical slope length from \(2\pi\) to 6 in order to obtain the condition; as a consequence, only 12 Dehn fillings on a manifold with a single torus boundary or cusp can produce an exceptional manifold where one of the properties of the condition fails. The second approach is combinatorial using the notion of an angled ideal triangulation first studied by Casson. This allows, using dihedral angles of the simplices, to define a combinatorial length of a slope (simplicial path) on a boundary torus. Then a combinatorial version of the \(2\pi\)-theorem is proved for manifolds with an angled ideal triangulation: if the combinatorial slope for each boundary torus is greater than \(2\pi\) then the manifold obtained by Dehn filling along these slopes satisfies again the above condition. This is applied to surgery on alternating knots and links; for example, if the volume of an alternating knot is greater than a constant independent of the knot then every non-trivial surgery on the knot yields a 3-manifold satisfying the above condition. Both the differential geometric and the combinatorial approach to word hyperbolic Dehn surgery have as their basis Gabai's ubiquity theorem which was used by Gabai and Kazez to show that any closed atoroidal 3-manifold with a genuine lamination has word hyperbolic fundamental group. A new simplified proof of this theorem is given.