Affine Hirsch foliations on 3-manifolds (Q2398833)

In 1975, \textit{M. Hirsch} [Lect. Notes Math. 468, 8--9 (1975; Zbl 0305.57022)] constructed an analytic 2-foliation on a closed 3-manifold such that the foliation contains exactly one exceptional minimal set. The foliation is constructed by starting with a solid torus and removing from the interior another solid torus which wraps around the original solid torus twice. This gives a manifold, foliated by 2-punctured disks, with two transverse tori as boundary components. When the exterior boundary component is glued to the interior boundary with a carefully chosen gluing map, the 2-punctured fibration structure induces an analytic foliation which contains exactly one exceptional minimal set. This construction has become known as a \textit{Hirsch foliation}. Many variations of Hirsch's construction have been developed in the literature. \textit{E. Ghys} [Ann. Math. (2) 141, No. 2, 387--422 (1995; Zbl 0843.57026)] considered a variant in which he changed Hirsch's gluing map to a map that is affine in a suitable sense. These foliations are now known as \textit{affine Hirsch foliations}. Affine Hirsch foliations can be further generalized using braids as follows. Consider any \(n\)-braid \(b\), whose closure is a knot embedded in the interior of a solid torus \(V\). Remove from the interior of \(V\) a small solid torus \(V_0\) which is a tubular neighbourhood of the closure of \(b\). Thereby one gets a compact 3-manifold, foliated by \(n\)-punctured disks, with two boundary components transverse to the \(n\)-punctured disk fibration. Finally, glue the exterior boundary component to the interior boundary component to obtain a foliated manifold induced by the \(n\)-punctured disk fibration. These new foliations, for simplicity also called affine Hirsch foliations, are the main objects in the present paper. In his main result, the author proves that up to isotopic leaf-conjugacy, every closed orientable 3-manifold \(M\) admits zero, one or two affine Hirsch foliations, and every case is possible. He also proves that for every integer \(n\geq 1\), there are only finitely many Hirsch manifolds with \textit{strand number} \(n\), where \(n\) is the number of strings in the underlying braid.