Closed surface bundles of least volume (Q611922)

The authors study hyperbolic surface bundles obtained by Dehn surgery on the two components of the Whitehead link sibling. Among these, they determine, for all \(g>2\), a manifold \(M_g\), which is a surface bundle with fibre of genus \(g\), and which is shown to be volume minimising among all bundles with fibre of genus \(g\) obtained in this way, provided that \(g\) is sufficiently large. The proof is based on an improvement of the Neumann-Zagier asymptotic volume formula for this specific situation. The authors point out that the interest of the family of manifolds they introduce comes from the following fact: Assuming that all hyperbolic manifolds with first Betti number \(\geq 2\) have volume bounded below by the volume of the Whitehead link sibling, then for \(g\) large enough, \(M_g\) realises the minimum volume among all hyperbolic surface bundles with fibre a closed surface of genus \(g\). In the last part of the paper, the authors consider the monodromy of the fibration for all surface bundles obtained by Dehn surgery on the Whitehead link sibling. It is well-known that each such monodromy can be realised by a pseudo-Anosov map. The authors prove that, for large \(g\), the pseudo-Anosov realising the monodromy of \(M_g\) minimises dilatation among all pseudo-Anosov maps defined over a closed surface of genus \(g\) whose mapping tori can be obtained by Dehn surgery on the Whitehead link sibling. Under the same assumption on the volume of hyperbolic manifolds with \(b_1\geq 2\) seen before, there are infinitely many \(g\)'s for which a pseudo-Anosov defined over a closed surface of genus \(g\) cannot realise the smallest dilatation and have a mapping torus of minimum volume among all surface bundles of fibre of genus \(g\) at the same time.