Generating pairs of 2-bridge knot groups (Q2430731)

Two generating systems of a group are said to be Nielsen equivalent when one is obtained from the other by repeating the following procedures finitely many times: (a) Change the system by a permutation. (b) Replace one generator with its inverse. (c) For two generators \(a,b\) in the system, replace \(a\) with \(ab\). It was proved by Delzant that any torsion-free two-generator Gromov hyperbolic group has only finitely many Nielsen equivalence classes of generating pairs. This was generalised to finitely generated Gromov hyperbolic groups with arbitrarily large number of generators by Kapovich and Weidman. In a more concrete setting, Agol showed that for closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds with a positive lower bound \(\varepsilon\) for the injectivity radii, the number of Nielsen equivalence classes of their fundamental groups are bounded by a constant depending only on \(\varepsilon\). In contrast to these results, the authors show that there is a hyperbolic 2-bridge know exterior whose fundamental group has infinitely many Nielsen equivalence classes of generating pairs. Furthermore, by considering hyperbolic Dehn surgeries of such a knot exterior, it is shown that for any \(n\), there is a closed hyperbolic \(3\)-manifold whose fundamental group has more than \(n\) Nielsen equivalence classes of generating pairs.