Heegaard gradient and virtual fibers (Q813167)

There are three famous conjectures devoted to the behavior of finite covers of 3-manifolds: the virtually Haken conjecture, the positive virtual \(b_1\) conjecture and the virtually fibered conjecture. In the present excellent paper the author proves that if a closed hyperbolic 3-manifold has infinitely many finite covers of bounded Heegaard genus, then it is virtually fibered. One of the main technical tools used in the proof is a generalized sweepout.