No Arabic abstract
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.
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.
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.
Quasi-alternating links are a natural generalization of alternating links. In this paper, we show that quasi-alternating links are homologically thin for both Khovanov homology and knot Floer homology. In particular, their bigraded homology groups are determined by the signature of the link, together with the Euler characteristic of the respective homology (i.e. the Jones or the Alexander polynomial). The proofs use the exact triangles relating the homology of a link with the homologies of its two resolutions at a crossing.
The volume density of a hyperbolic link is defined as the ratio of hyperbolic volume to crossing number. We study its properties and a closely-related invariant called the determinant density. It is known that the sets of volume densities and determinant densities of links are dense in the interval [0,v_{oct}]. We construct sequences of alternating knots whose volume and determinant densities both converge to any x in [0,v_{oct}]. We also investigate the distributions of volume and determinant densities for hyperbolic rational links, and establish upper bounds and density results for these invariants.
We introduce a class of links strictly containing quasi-alternating links for which mod 2 reduced Khovanov homology is always thin. We compute the framed instanton homology for double branched covers of such links. Aligning certain dotted markings on a link with bundle data over the branched cover, we also provide many computations of framed instanton homology in the presence of a non-trivial real 3-plane bundle. We discuss evidence for a spectral sequence from the twisted Khovanov homology of a link with mod 2 coefficients to the framed instanton homology of the double branched cover. We also discuss the relevant mod 4 gradings.