Essential twisted surfaces in alternating link complements (Q728313)

Checkerboard surfaces in alternating link complements are known to be incompressible and boundary incompressible; they have been used e.g. to analyze volumes, singular structures and polyhedral decompositions of the complements. As the authors note, the genus of a checkerboard surface is determined by the crossing number of the diagram, hence, by adding more and more crossings to a single twist region of a hyperbolic link diagram, the genus increases without bound while the link complement approaches a geometric limit. In order to avoid this phenomenon, in the present paper the authors generalize checkerboard surfaces in alternating link complements to another class of surfaces which they call \textit{twisted checkerboard surfaces} (obtained by first adding crossing circles to a diagram, i.e. simple closed curves encircling a twist region and bounding a disk in \(S^3\)). Twisted checkerboard surfaces are immersed rather than embedded but ``they capture the geometry of the link complement in useful ways when the link has many crossings in some twist regions''. The main result of the present paper states that twisted checkerboard surfaces are essential (they play an important role in the authors' recent proof that alternating knots have cusp volume bounded below by a linear function of the twist number of the knot [Geom. Topol. 20, No. 4, 2053--2078 (2016; Zbl 1378.57011)]).