Boundary curves of surfaces with the 4--plane property (Q1811530)

A surface in a 3-manifold is said to have the 4-plane property if its preimage in the universal cover of the 3-manifold is a union of planes, and among any collection of 4 planes, there is a disjoint pair. In this paper, the author shows that for an orientable and irreducible 3-manifold \(M\) whose boundary is a compressible torus and does not contain any closed nonperipheral embedded incompressible surfaces, the immersed surfaces in \(M\) with the 4-plane property can realize only finitely many boundary slopes. This theorem generalizes a result of \textit{A. E. Hatcher} [Pac. J. Math. 99, 373-377 (1982; Zbl 0502.57005)] in the theory of incompressible surfaces. However, Hatcher's theorem is not true for immersed \(\pi _1\)-injective surfaces in general. Aitchison and Rubinstein have shown that if a 3-manifold has a nonpositive cubing, then it contains a surface with the 4-plane property. This paper shows that only finitely many Dehn fillings of \(M\) can yield 3-manifolds with nonpositive cubings. This gives examples of hyperbolic 3-manifolds that do not admit any nonpositive cubings.