Augmentation rank of satellites with braid pattern (Q2396637)

For a knot in the \(3\)-sphere, the meridional rank of the knot is the minimal number of meridians that generate the knot group. A famous open problem due to Cappell and Shaneson asks if the meridional rank is equal to the bridge number. It is solved for Montesinos knots. The present paper under review solves the above conjecture for a large class of iterated torus knots by using knot contact homology. In fact, the main result is stronger. For the knot contact homology of a knot, an augmentation and its rank are introduced, and then the augmentation rank of the knot is defined to be the maximum rank among all augmentations. This augmentation rank gives a lower bound for the meridional rank. The main result gives an exact equality between augmentation ranks for a satellite knot with a braid pattern.