On diagrammatic bounds of knot volumes and spectral invariants (Q5961888)

The authors present a family of hyperbolic knots for which the diagrammatic quantities, called twist numbers and generalized twist numbers, cannot give two-sided estimates on the geometric invariants of their complements, that are the hyperbolic volume and the first eigenvalue of the Laplacian. These diagrammatic quantities are known to be useful to estimate the geometric quantities for some classes of knots by several recent works. Thus the results given in the paper under review tell that there are no direct generalizations for the general cases in these directions. The key of the proofs is to use the \textit{double coil knots}, defined as knots having exactly two generalized twist regions (with some technical assumptions). Actually the authors show that (1a) there is a sequence of double coil knots so that their twist numbers go to infinity while their hyperbolic volumes stay bounded, (1b) all double coil knots have generalized twist number two but their volumes are unbounded, (2a) there is a sequence of double coil knots so that their twist numbers go to infinity while the first eigenvalues of the Laplacian are bounded, (2b) all double coil knots have generalized twist number two but the infimum of the first eigenvalues of the Laplacian is zero.