Generalizations of Agol's inequality and nonexistence of tight laminations (Q539022)

The author gives a general lower bound for the normal Gromov norm \(\|M,\partial M\|_{\mathcal{F}}^{norm}\) of a genuine lamination \(\mathcal{F}\) in terms of the topology of the complementary regions of \(\mathcal{F}.\) In the special case of 3-manifolds, this yields a generalization of Agol's inequality from incompressible surfaces to tight laminations. More precisely, assume that \(M\) is a compact orientable 3-manifold with (possibly empty) boundary consisting of incompressible tori, and let \(\mathcal{F}\) be an essential lamination of \(M\). Then \(\overline{M-\mathcal{F}}\) has a characteristic submanifold which is the maximal submanifold that can be decomposed into \(I\)-bundles and solid tori, respecting boundary patterns. The complement of this characteristic submanifold is denoted by Guts\((\overline{M-\mathcal{F} }).\) It admits a hyperbolic metric with geodesic boundary and cusps. Under these hypothesis for \(M\) and \(\mathcal{F},\) the main result of the paper in dimension three is that, \(\|M,\partial M\|_{\mathcal{F}}^{norm}\geq-\chi (\)Guts\((\overline{M-\mathcal{F}})).\) In particular, this inequality excludes the existence of tight laminations with non-empty guts on 3-manifolds of small simplicial volume.