The link volume of 3-manifolds (Q1948303)

In this article the authors define and study an invariant of closed orientable \(3\)-manifolds called \textit{link volume}. They view a closed orientable \(3\)-manifold as a finite cover of the \(3\)-sphere branched over a hyperbolic link. To each cover they associate the product between the degree and the volume of the link exterior, looking at this number as a complexity for the cover. The link volume of a closed orientable \(3\)-manifold \(M\) is the infimum of these quantities among all the possible descriptions of \(M\) as a finite cover of the \(3\)-sphere branched over a hyperbolic link. Actually the infimum is always attained. Moreover the link volume of \(M\) is the volume of the complement of a link in \(M\) which implies for a hyperbolic manifold that the link volume is strictly greater than the hyperbolic volume. The first result in the article states that for every constant \(V>0\), there exists a finite family of finite volume hyperbolic manifolds called ``parent manifolds'' such that any manifold of link volume at most \(V\) is obtained by Dehn filling of a parent manifold. The proof is based on a similar statement of Jorgensen and Thurston about the hyperbolic volume. A parent manifold is constructed as a preimage with respect to a fixed finite branched cover of a hyperbolic manifold obtained by drilling out certain geodesics from the link exterior in the \(3\)-sphere. As a consequence the authors are led to believe that the link volume is much bigger than the hyperbolic volume. More precisely they conjecture that for every constant \(V>0\) there exists a manifold of volume less than the volume of the figure eight knot complement and with link volume bigger than \(V\). Moreover, they provide a linear estimate of the link volume of a manifold obtained by Dehn filling of a connected compact orientable \(3\)-manifold with boundary tori in terms of the length of the continued fraction expansion of the filling curves. In the proof they modify and adapt to the case with boundary \textit{H. M. Hilden}'s construction of simple \(3\)-fold covers of the \(3\)-sphere [Bull. Am. Math. Soc. 80, 1243--1244 (1974; Zbl 0298.55001)], in particular they obtain a Dehn filling as a simple \(3\)-fold cover of the \(3\)-sphere branched over a hyperbolic knot (the hyperbolicity is established using \textit{W. Thurston} and \textit{W. Menasco}'s results [Topology 23, 37--44 (1984; Zbl 0525.57003)]).