On tunnel numbers of a cable knot and its companion (Q2215646)

The tunnel number of a knot is the minimal number of arcs to be added to the knot so that the complement becomes a handlebody. It is a knot invariant and every knot is either hyperbolic, a torus knot, or a satellite knot. In this paper, the authors provide an interesting family of cable knots which is contained in the set of satellite knots and which has inequalities for the tunnel numbers between the cable knot and its companion. For a given nontrivial knot \(K\) in \(S^3\), they take \((p\geq 2, q)\)-cable knots, which are nontrivial cable knots, denoted by \(K^*\). They first prove that \(t(K^*)\geq t(K)\) and that \(t(K^*)=t(K)\) if \(K^*\) is a \((p,q)\)-cable and \(K\) is \(p/q\)-primitive by the fact that \(t(K^*)\leq t(K)\) if \(K\) and \(K^*\) satisfy the same condition. For the main result, they find two conditions for equality \(t(K^*)=t(K)+1\) as follows: \((1)\) either \(K\) admits a high distance Heegaard splitting or \(p/q\) is far away from a fixed subset in the Farey graph. In order to prove the main result, they use interesting and excellent combinatorial techniques on the Heegaard splitting of the knot exterior in \(S^3\). Moreover, by using a construction of satellite knot from the cable knot \(K^*\) they give an example of a satellite knot which has arbitrary large tunnel number difference from the companion \(K\).