Purely cosmetic surgeries and pretzel knots (Q2234348)

This paper studies Dehn surgeries on pretzel knots and proves that every pretzel knot satisfies the purely cosmetic surgery conjecture. Given a knot in the 3-sphere, two Dehn surgeries on the knot are said to be purely cosmetic if the resulting manifolds are orientation-preservingly diffeomorphic. The purely cosmetic surgery conjecture states that if two surgeries on the same knot are purely cosmetic, then their coefficients coincide with each other. The conjecture is known to be true for Seifert genus one knots [\textit{J. Wang}, Algebr. Geom. Topol. 6, 1491--1517 (2006; Zbl 1130.57020)], two-bridge knots [\textit{K. Ichihara} et al., ibid. 21, No. 5, 2411--2424 (2021; Zbl 1484.57005)], connected sums [\textit{R. Tao}, ``Connected sums of knots do not admit purely cosmetic surgeries'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1909.05048}], 3-braid knots [\textit{K. Varvarezos}, Acta Math. Hung. 164, No. 2, 451--457 (2021; Zbl 1499.57007)], and prime knots with at most 16 crossings [\textit{J. Hanselman}, ``Heegaard Floer homology and cosmetic surgeries in $S^3$'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1906.06773}, to appear in J. Eur. Math. Soc.]. In this paper, the authors show that any pretzel knot satisfies the purely cosmetic surgery conjecture. Obstructions for purely cosmetic surgeries mainly used are given by the following result by Hanselman [loc. cit.]: if a knot \(K\) admits purely cosmetic surgeries, then \(\mathrm{th}(K) \le 5\) (for the thickness) or \(g(K)= 2\) (for the Seifert genus). In the proof for the pretzel knots with five strands, they additionally use the following obstructions: (i) \(\tau (K)=0\) for the tau-invariant [\textit{Y. Ni} and \textit{Z. Wu}, J. Reine Angew. Math. 706, 1--17 (2015; Zbl 1328.57010)], (ii) \(\Delta_K''(1)=0\) for the Alexander polynomial [\textit{S. Boyer} and \textit{D. Lines}, J. Reine Angew. Math. 405, 181--220 (1990; Zbl 0691.57004)], and (iii) \(V_K''(1)=V_K'''(1)=0\) for the Jones polynomial [\textit{K. Ichihara} and \textit{Z. Wu}, Commun. Anal. Geom. 27, No. 5, 1087--1104 (2019; Zbl 1436.57005)].