Non-integral toroidal Dehn surgeries (Q707480)

For a hyperbolic knot in the \(3\)-sphere, a non-trivial Dehn surgery usually yields a hyperbolic \(3\)-manifold. However, some hyperbolic knots admit surgeries which yield lens spaces or small Seifert fibered spaces or toroidal manifolds, that is, manifolds containing incompressible tori. The third case is referred to as a toroidal surgery. In earlier papers [ibid. 3, 597--644 (1995; Zbl 0865.57015) and ibid. 8, 671--725 (2000; Zbl 0970.57010)], the authors proved that a toroidal surgery on a hyperbolic knot is either integral or half-integral. This means that the slope corresponding to a toroidal surgery runs at most twice along the knot. Before that, \textit{M. Eudave-Muñoz} constructed an infinite family of hyperbolic knots, each of which has a half-integral toroidal surgery in [Geometric topology, 1993 Georgia international topology conference, August 2--13, 1993, Stud. Adv. Math. 2.1, 35--61 (1997; Zbl 0889.57023)]. He also showed that if the surgery is half-integral, then the manifold obtained by the surgery contains an incompressible separating torus meeting the core of the attached solid torus minimally in two points, and one side of the torus is a Seifert fibered space over the disk with two exceptional fibers. Furthermore, he observed that the knots are strongly invertible, and their tunnel number is at most two. Thus Eudave-Muñoz knots were expected to give all hyperbolic knots with non-integral toroidal surgeries. The paper under review gives the affirmative answer to this problem. The argument starts at the labelled intersection graphs on a suitably chosen Heegaard sphere and a suitably chosen incompressible torus. First, the existence of a certain kind of subgraph, called a great web, is shown with an additional technical property. A new notion of good face is introduced, and the great web is shown to contain two good faces. This implies that both sides of the incompressible torus in the toroidal manifold are Seifert fibered spaces over the disk with two exceptional fibers, and enables to describe the knot exterior in terms of Dehn surgery on a certain \(5\)-component strongly invertible link. Finally, the authors take a quotient of this link by the involution, and show that the tangle covered by the knot exterior coincides with the tangle used by Eudave-Muñoz. In the appendix, the hyperbolic knots in solid tori which admit non-integral toroidal surgeries are classified.