Generalized bipyramids and hyperbolic volumes of alternating \(k\)-uniform tiling links (Q2293012)

Let \(X\) be either the sphere, the Euclidean plane or the hyperbolic plane. A \(k\)-uniform tiling is an edge-to-edge tiling of \(X\) by polygons, whose symmetry group is cocompact and has \(k\) transitivity classes of vertices. By Selberg's Lemma, the symmetry group has a torsion-free, cocompact subgroup \(\Gamma\), and \(\Gamma\backslash X\) inherits a tiling. For \(k\)-uniform tilings which are \(3\)- or \(4\)-regular (or have a mix of \(3\)- and \(4\)-valent vertices such that there exists a collection of edges which pairs the \(3\)-valent vertices), the authors study a construction of an alternating link in the thickened surface \(S_g\times I\) where \(S_g\) is a finite covering of \(\Gamma\backslash X\), such that the link projects to the tiling. (Clearly, \(g\ge 2\) if \(X\) is the hyperbolic plane, \(g=1\) if \(X\) is the Euclidean plane.) These links are called tiling links. For \(g\ge 1\), the complement of a tiling link in \(S_g\times I\) is hyperbolic, and for \(g\ge 2\) it is hyperbolic with totally geodesic boundary \(S_g\times\left\{0,1\right\}\). The authors prove that for \(g\ge 1\) the complement of a tiling link in \(S_g\times I\) has a decomposition into generalized (i.e., ideal or truncated) octahedra, the number of which equals the crossing number \(c(L)\) of the link. Each of the generalized octahedra has two vertices on \(L\) and the other vertices are either ideal (if \(g=1\)) or truncated (if \(g\ge 2\)). The dihedral angles of the decomposition are specified by the angles of the tiling. The authors study the relation between volume and dihedral angles to get information on the volume \(\mathrm{vol}(L)\) of the link complement (as a hyperbolic manifold with totally geodesic boundary). The main result of the paper is that the volume densities vol(L)/c(L) of tiling links (across all genera \(g\ge 2\)) form a dense subset of \(\left[0,2v_{\mathrm{oct}}\right]\), where \(v_{\mathrm{oct}}=3,663\ldots\) is the volume of the regular ideal octahedron.