Semisimple tunnels (Q450507)

The authors consider a special family of knots with tunnel number equal to \(1\), namely those that can be put in \(1\)-bridge position with respect to the genus-\(1\) Heegaard splitting of the \(3\)-sphere, i.e. \textsl{\((1,1)\)-knots}. Each of these knots can be described as the closure of a \(2\)-braid of the torus and admits two specific tunnels called the \textsl{upper} and \textsl{lower} tunnels of the knot. A numerical invariant can be associated to these tunnels. Roughly speaking this numerical invariant (which consists in a sequence of rationals, each called \textsl{slope invariant})) encodes a way to pass from a genus-\(2\) Heegaard splitting for the unknot (seen as an unkotted theta-curve) to the genus-\(2\) Heegaard splitting for the given knot and chosen tunnel, via a finite sequence of modifications to be performed on two arcs of the theta-curve. Each modification consists in replacing a trivial tangle by a rational one (determined by the corresponding rational number in the sequence). The main result of the paper shows how one can pass in an algorithmic way from the sequence of slope invariants for a \((1,1)\)-knot to a \(2\)-braid on the torus describing the knot and back. The authors have also implemented the algorithm as software. Finally, the authors use the slope invariants to characterise \(2\)-bridge knots among \((1,1)\)-knots. Moreover they show that a \(2\)-bridge knot is a torus knot if and only if it admits a special \((1,1)\)-position called \textsl{toroidal}.