Promoting essential laminations (Q863430)

The main result in this paper says that a transversely orientable taut foliation of a closed, orientable, algebraically atoroidal 3-manifold has either 2-sided branching and is the weak stable foliation of an Anosov flow, or else there are a pair of very full genuine laminations that are transverse to the foliation. As a corollary, and using work of Gabai-Kazez, the author obtains that if \(M\) is a closed 3-manifold which admits a taut foliation, then either \(M\) is toroidal, or it admits an Anosov flow whose weak stable and unstable foliations have 2-sided branching, or else \(\pi_1(M)\) is word hyperbolic, the mapping class group of \(M\) is finite, and every homeomorphism of \(M\) homotopic to the identity is isotopic to the identity. A large portion of this paper is expository. In particular, the author describes the various notions of foliations and laminations that are used (taut foliations, essential laminations, genuine laminations, Candel's uniformization of hyperbolic laminations, the author's and Dunfield's work on laminations and homeomorphisms of the circle, etc.).