Cosmetic surgery and the link volume of hyperbolic 3-manifolds (Q728321)

In three-manifold topology an important invariant is given by the hyperbolic volume, which associates to a manifold the sum of the Riemannian volumes of the hyperbolic pieces in its geometric decomposition. For closed hyperbolic manifolds it is a measure of complexity, for example it gives a lower bound for the number of tetrahedra in an ideal traingulation. In a previous paper [Algebr. Geom. Topol. 13, No. 2, 927--958 (2013; Zbl 1275.57002)] the authors introduced the link volume of a 3-manifold, which is in some sense a refinement of the hyperbolic volume. Briefly, to define the link volume one represents the manifold as a branched cover of a hyperbolic link and takes the corresponding volume (degree times the volume of the link) and then looks at the infimum over all such representations. For example, if \(M\) is obtained by Dehn surgery on a finite-volume manifold which is a (regular) cover of a hyperbolic link then one obtains a volume strictly greater than the volume of the manifold (since hyperbolic Dehn surgery decreases volume). In fact this remains true when taking the infimum, so the link volume is always strictly larger than the hyperbolic volume. In this paper the authors prove that the difference between (or the quotient of) the two can be arbitrarily large. To do so they show that the link volumes of Dehn surgeries on any given hyperbolic manifold of finite volume with exactly one cusp are unbounded. More precisely, they show that a set of slopes gives hyperbolic Dehn fillings with unbounded volumes as soon as its diameter in the Farey graph is unbounded. The proof of this result uses the description given in the authors' previous work [loc. cit.] for the set of hyperbolic manifolds with bounded link volume, and the study of cosmetic surgeries on 3-manifolds (these are the Dehn surgeries which do not change the diffeomorphism class of the manifold).