On Coxeter mapping classes and fibered alternating links (Q516602)

An alternating Coxeter graph is a bipartite graph with vertex set partitioned into positive and negative vertices. Given such a graph, there is a well defined Coxeter transformation, and associated mapping class over a surface. (A significant portion of this paper is devoted to the thorough presentation of these constructions.) For a special class of graphs including trees, this mapping class is the monodromy for an alternating link complement. The resulting links are the so-called alternating Coxeter links. The objects of study in this paper are the characteristic polynomials of these alternating Coxeter transformations and in particular the Alexander polynomials of alternating Coxeter links. The main result of this paper (Theorem 3) is that the roots of the characteristic polynomial of an alternating Coxeter mapping class are real and positive. In particular, the same must be true of the Alexander polynomial of alternating Coxeter links. To give some context for this result, in the 50's Murasugi showed that every real root of an alternating link must be positive, and in 2002 Hoste conjectured that the real part of every root of the Alexander polynomial of an alternating link must be greater than \(-1\). The authors also study the dilatation of these mapping classes, and find that it increases under graph inclusion. By computing it for the special case of a 2-vertex tree (whose Coxeter mapping class is the monodromy of the figure-eight knot) they find that the minimum dilatation of all alternating sign Coxeter mapping classes is the square of the golden ratio.