Bounds on Pachner moves and systoles of cusped 3-manifolds (Q2106583)

Let \(M\) be a complete orientable cusped hyperbolic \(3\)-manifold. The authors study the systole length and the number of Pachner moves needed to change one triangulation to another. The \textit{systole length} of \(M\) is the length of a shortest closed geodesic. A \textit{geometric} ideal triangulation \(\tau\) of \(M\) is a realization of \(M\) as the quotient of a collection of hyperbolic ideal tetrahedra by face pairing isometries so that the tetrahedra glue together to give the complete hyperbolic structure on \(M\). As the first main result the authors obtain, for a given geometric ideal triangulation \(\tau\) of \(M\), a lower bound for the systole length of \(M\) in terms of the number of tetrahedra and a lower bound on dihedral angles. The authors note that this leads to an effective algorithm to decide whether two hyperbolic knots are equivalent, given geometric ideal triandulations of their complements. Any two topological ideal triangulations \(\tau_1\) and \(\tau_2\) of \(M\) are related by a sequence of Pachner moves through topological ideal triangulations. (The two types of Pachner moves are local changes to the triangulation). As the second main result the authors obtain a bound on the length of the sequence of these Pachner moves in terms of the total number of tetrahedra and a lower bound on dihedral angles of \(\tau_1\) and \(\tau_2\). The existence of a common geometric subdivision then allows the authors to prove that any two geometric ideal triangulations of \(M\) are in fact related by a sequence of Pachner moves through geometric (possibly non-ideal) triangulations.