Excellent 1-manifolds in compact 3-manifolds (Q685905)

In previous papers the author proved that each compact orientable 3- manifold \(M\) contains an excellent knot or, if \(\partial M\neq\emptyset\), a properly embedded excellent arc (i.e. a knot resp. arc with hyperbolic complement). This was used to prove that closed orientable 3-manifolds are determined, up to homeomorphism, by their knot groups. The main result of the present paper gives the following generalization (to the nonorientable case, gaining also control over the homotopy class of the 1-manifold): a compact properly embedded 1-manifold \(J\) (a collection of arcs and circles) in a compact 3-manifold is homotopic relative \(\partial J\) to an excellent 1-manifold \(K\) if and only if \(J\) meets every 2-sphere resp. projective plane in \(\partial M\) in at least 2 points resp. 1 point; moreover in this case there are infinitely many such \(K\)'s with nonhomeomorphic exteriors, and each \(K\) can be chosen ribbon concordant to \(J\). Several applications are given: arbitrary compact 3-manifolds whose boundaries do not contain 2-spheres or projective planes are determined by their knot groups; every such 3-manifold is relative homology cobordant to an excellent (hyperbolic) 3-manifold; and such a 3- manifold \(M\) has Heegaard genus 1 if and only if there exists a knot \(K\) in \(M\) such that every knot in \(M\) isotops into a regular neighbourhood of \(K\) (extending a result of Haas-Thompson to the bounded and nonorientable case). For the first application, Johannson's theorem on the determination of boundary irreducible, anannular Haken 3-manifolds by their fundamental groups is generalized to the nonorientable case.