Infinitely many meridional essential surfaces of bounded genus in hyperbolic knot exteriors
In the study of 3-manifolds, an important issue is the existence of an infinite collection of hyperbolic knots each of which has a set of meridional planar essential surfaces of unbounded Euler characteristics properly embedded in its exterior. In this paper, the author proves that each of these knots has essential tangle decompositions of arbitrarily large number of strings. Also, the author shows that each of these knots has in its exterior meridional essential surfaces of any positive genus and (even) number of boundary components. That is, the compact surfaces that have a meridional essential embedding into a hyperbolic knot exterior have meridional essential embeddings into each of these hyperbolic knot's exteriors, as shown in the statement of Theorem 1. The result of this paper complements and contrasts with result of \textit{U. Oertel} [Pac. J. Math. 202, No. 2, 449--458 (2002; Zbl 1064.57020)], extending work attributed by Oertel to \textit{W. Jaco} and \textit{E. Sedgwick} [Topology 42, No. 4, 845--906 (2003; Zbl 1013.57013)], saying in particular that a knot exterior without essential genus one surfaces has at most infinitely many isotopy classes of compact essential surfaces of uniformly bounded genus. Moreover, it also complements a result by \textit{W. Menasco} [ibid. 23, 37--44 (1984; Zbl 0525.57003)] stating that non-split prime alternating knots have at most infinitely many meridional essential meridionally-incompressible surfaces of uniformly bounded genus.
scientific article; zbMATH DE number 7430039