On the complexity and volume of hyperbolic 3-manifolds (Q1955867)

From the recent solution of the geometrization conjecture for 3-manifolds it follows that every aspherical 3-manifold is uniquely determined by its fundamental group. As in the Introduction of this paper, it is natural to consider the relations between topological/geometrical invariants of such a manifold and combinatorial invariants of its fundamental group. The authors discuss the relation between the volume of a hyperbolic 3-manifold \(M\) of finite volume and a notion of complexity of its fundamental group \(\pi_{1}M.\) The minimum of the number of relations of length 3 taken over all presentations of a finitely presented group \(G\) containing only relations of length at most 3 is called the (absolute) invariant \(T\) and is denoted by \(T(G)\). This \(T(G)\) is a measure of complexity of \(G\). In this paper the authors also use a relative version of the absolute invariant \(T\). Let \(\mathcal E\) be a family of subgroups of \(G\). We say that \(T(G,{\mathcal E})\leq {t}\) if there exists a simply-connected 2-dimensional complex \(P\) such that \(G\) acts simplicially on \(P\), the number of 2-faces of the quotient (an orbihedron) \(\Pi =P/G\) is at most \(t\), and the stabilizers of vertices of \(P\) are elements of \(\mathcal E.\) Let \(E_{\mu}\) and \(E\) denote the families of elementary subgroups of \(\pi_{1}M\) with the translation length at most the Margulis constant \(\mu=\mu(3)\) and any family of elementary subgroups, respectively. The main goal of this paper is to show that there exists a constant \(C\) such that the following statements hold: (i) \(\frac{1}{C}\cdot T(\pi_{1}M,E_{\mu}) \leq \text{Vol} M \leq \pi \cdot T(\pi_{1}M,E_{\mu}),\) where Vol stands for the hyperbolic volume. (ii) \(T(\pi_{1}M, E_{\mu}) \leq C\cdot \pi \cdot T(\pi_{1}M,E).\) (iii) If \(M=M_{{\mu}thick}\), i.e., every loop in \(M\) of length less than \(\mu\) is homotopically trivial, then \(T(\pi_{1}M)\leq C \cdot \pi \cdot T(\pi_{1}M,E).\) The first one generalizes D. Cooper's result, which shows that if \(M\) is a compact hyperbolic 3-manifold, then \(\text{Vol}M \leq \pi \cdot T(\pi_{1}M).\)