Exceptional Dehn surgery on large arborescent knots (Q650132)

An arborescent link or knot is obtained by gluing two arborescent tangles along their boundaries. This class includes all two bridge links and Montesinos links. An arborescent tangle is the sum of several Montesinos tangles. According to \textit{Y.-Q. Wu} [``Dehn surgery on arborescent knots'', J. Differ. Geom. 43, No. 1, 171--197 (1996; Zbl 0851.57018)], arborescent knots are classified into three types. Type I knots are Montesinos knots with length at most 3. A type II knot admits a Conway sphere cutting the knot into two Montesinos tangles of type \((r_i,1/2)\). The others are type III. An arborescent knot is said to be large if it admits an essential Conway sphere. All large arborescent knots are known to be hyperbolic. Moreover, such knots do not admit non-trivial exceptional Dehn surgery, except type II knots. In fact, type II knots admit neither non-integral exceptional surgery nor reducing surgery. Thus it remains to determine which type II knots admit integral surgeries producing Seifert fibered manifolds or toroidal manifolds. The main result of the paper is the complete determination of large arborescent knots which admit non-trivial exceptional Dehn surgery. More precisely, there are only three such knots and each of them admits exactly one toroidal surgery. As an interesting byproduct, such toroidal surgery yields an essential torus which intersects the core of the attached solid torus in four points minimally. In the proof, a result of \textit{M. Brittenham} [``Exceptional Seifert-fibered spaces and Dehn surgery on 2-bridge knots'', Topology 37, No. 3, 665--672 (1998; Zbl 0912.57010)] is used to exclude an exceptional surgery yielding a small Seifert fibered manifold. An essential punctured torus in the knot exterior is decomposed into special disks, each of which is located in a rational tangle exterior. An detailed analysis of the positions of such disks leads to the determination of knots.