Structural description of dihedral extended Schottky groups and application in study of symmetries of handlebodies (Q6077863)

A \textit{symmetry} of a closed Riemann surface \(S\) is an anticonformal involution of \(S\) (its fixed point set is empty or consists of at most \(g+1\) simple loops). Given a symmetry \(\tau\), there exists an \textit{extended Schottky group} \(K\) (an extended Kleinian group, i.e., containing orientation-reversing or anticonformal elements) whose orientation-preserving subgroup (``half'') is a Schottky group uniformizing \(S\) such that the symmetry \(\tau\) is obtained by projecting \(K\) to \(S\) [the authors, Glasg. Math. J. 55, No. 3, 591--613 (2013; Zbl 1280.30021)]. A \textit{dihedral extended Schottky group} is a group generated by two different extended Schottky groups with the same orientation-preserving half. ``Such configuration of groups corresponds to closed Riemann surfaces together with two different symmetries, and the aim of this paper is to provide a geometrical structure of them'' (in terms of Klein-Maskit combination of various types of basic elementary groups). ``This result can be used in the study of 3-dimensional manifolds, and as an illustration we give the sharp bounds for the total number of connected components of the locus of fixed points of two and three different symmetries of a handlebody with a Schottky structure.''