Efficient triangulations and boundary slopes (Q2029624)

Let \(M\) be a compact, orientable, irreducible, boundary-irreducible, and an-annular 3-manifold. This paper proves by normal surface theory that \(M\) admits only finitely many boundary slopes for incompressible and boundary-incompressible surfaces of bounded Euler characteristic. A triangulation of \(M\) is said to be annular-efficient if it is 0-efficient, i.e., the only normal disks are vertex-linking, and the only normal incompressible annuli are thin edge-linking, i.e, they are normally isotopic into an arbitrarily small regular neighborhood of an edge in the triangulation. The authors show that if \(\mathcal{T}\) is an annular-efficient triangulation of \(M\), then there are only finitely many boundary-slopes for connected normal surfaces in \(\mathcal{T}\) of a bounded Euler characteristic. It is thus enough to prove that any \(M\) admits an annular-efficient triangulation. It has been shown in [\textit{W. Jaco} and \textit{J. H. Rubinstein}, J. Differ. Geom. 65, No. 1, 61--168 (2003; Zbl 1068.57023)] that any triangulation \(\mathcal{T}\) of \(M\) can be modified by the crushing operation to an ideal triangulation \(\mathcal{T}'\) of the interior of \(M\). The authors prove in this paper that \(\mathcal{T}'\) can be further modified to an end-efficient ideal triangulation \(\mathcal{T}^{\ast}\). Then they prove that \(\mathcal{T}^{\ast}\) can be modified by inflation, developed in [\textit{W. Jaco} and \textit{J. H. Rubinstein}, Adv. Math. 267, 176--224 (2014; Zbl 1304.57034)], to an annular-efficient triangulation of \(M\).