Hyperbolicity of the canonical genus two knots (Q2188985)

Thurston showed that knots fall into three distinct classes: hyperbolic knots, torus knots and satellite knots (including composite knots). It is not trivial to identify hyperbolic knots, i.e., knots whose complements allow a complete hyperbolic structure, in general. The problem becomes more tractable if we restrict ourselves to certain families of knots. This paper classifies the hyperbolic knots of canonical genus at most 2. The canonical genus of a knot \(K\) is the minimal genus of any Seifert surface that can be constructed from a diagram of \(K\) using Seifert's algorithm. Note that the canonical genus is not necessarily equal to the Seifert genus, since not every Seifert surface can be constructed in this way. The classification confirms the additivity of the canonical genus under connected sum for the first non-trivial case, the connected sum of two knots of canonical genus 1, and shows that there are no prime satellite knots with canonical genus at most 2. The paper makes use of combinatorial and cut-and-paste arguments, but also develops techniques to use link polynomials to check if a given knot is prime.