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Menasco proved that nontrivial links in the 3-sphere with connected prime alternating non-2-braid projections are hyperbolic. This was further extended to augmented alternating links wherein non-isotopic trivial components bounding disks punctured twice by the alternating link were added. Lackenby proved that the first and second collections of links together form a closed subset of the set of all finite volume hyperbolic 3-manifolds in the geometric topology. Adams showed hyperbolicity for generalized augmented alternating links, which include additional trivial components that bound n-punctured disks for $n geq 2$. Here we prove that generalized augmented cellular alternating links in I-bundles over closed surfaces are also hyperbolic and that in $S times I$, the cellular alternating links and the augmented cellular alternating together form a closed subset of finite volume hyperbolic 3-manifolds in the geometric topology. Explicit examples of additional links in $S times I$ to which these results apply are included.
We discuss links in thickened surfaces. We define the Khovanov-Lipshitz-Sarkar stable homotopy type and the Steenrod square for the homotopical Khovanov homology of links in thickened surfaces with genus$>1$. A surface means a closed oriented surface unless otherwise stated. Of course, a surface may or may not be the sphere. A thickened surface means a product manifold of a surface and the interval. A link in a thickened surface (respectively, a 3-manifold) means a submanifold of a thickened surface (respectively, a 3-manifold) which is diffeomorphic to a disjoint collection of circles. Our Khovanov-Lipshitz-Sarkar stable homotopy type and our Steenrod square of links in thickened surfaces with genus$>1$ are stronger than the homotopical Khovanov homology of links in thickened surfaces with genus$>1$. It is the first meaningful Khovanov-Lipshitz-Sarkar stable homotopy type of links in 3-manifolds other than the 3-sphere. We point out that our theory has a different feature in the torus case.
Weakly generalised alternating knots are knots with an alternating projection onto a closed surface in a compact irreducible 3-manifold, and they share many hyperbolic geometric properties with usual alternating knots. For example, usual alternating knots have volume bounded above and below by the twist number of the alternating diagram due to Lackenby. Howie and Purcell showed that a similar lower bound holds for weakly generalised alternating knots. In this paper, we show that a generalisation of the upper volume bound does not hold, by producing a family of weakly generalised alternating knots in the 3-sphere with fixed twist number but unbounded volumes. As a corollary, generalised alternating knots can have arbitrarily small cusp density, in contrast with usual alternating knots whose cusp densities are bounded away from zero due to Lackenby and Purcell. On the other hand, we show that the twist number of a weakly generalised alternating projection does gives two sided linear bounds on volume inside a thickened surface; we state some related open questions.
We present explicit geometric decompositions of the complement of tiling links, which are alternating links whose projection graphs are uniform tilings of the 2-sphere, the Euclidean plane or the hyperbolic plane. This requires generalizing the angle structures program of Casson and Rivin for triangulations with a mixture of finite, ideal, and truncated (i.e. ultra-ideal) vertices. A consequence of this decomposition is that the volumes of spherical tiling links are precisely twice the maximal volumes of the ideal Archimedean solids of the same combinatorial description. In the case of hyperbolic tiling links, we are led to consider links embedded in thickened surfaces S_g x I with genus g at least 2. We generalize the bipyramid construction of Adams to truncated bipyramids and use them to prove that the set of possible volume densities for links in S_g x I, ranging over all g at least 2, is a dense subset of the interval [0, 2v_{oct}], where v_{oct}, approximately 3.66386, is the volume of the regular ideal octahedron.
In this note, we construct a chord index homomorphism from a subgroup of $H_1(Sigma, mathbb{Z})$ to the group of chord indices of a knot $K$ in $Sigmatimes I$. Some knot invariants derived from this homomorphism are discussed.
To any prime alternating link, we associate a collection of hyperbolic right-angled ideal polyhedra by relating geometric, topological and combinatorial methods to decompose the link complement. The sum of the hyperbolic volumes of these polyhedra is a new geometric link invariant, which we call the right-angled volume of the alternating link. We give an explicit procedure to compute the right-angled volume from any alternating link diagram, and prove that it is a new lower bound for the hyperbolic volume of the link.