Explicit Dehn filling and Heegaard splittings

We prove an explicit, quantitative criterion that ensures the Heegaard surfaces in Dehn fillings behave "as expected." Given a cusped hyperbolic manifold X, and a Dehn filling whose meridian and longitude curves are longer than 2pi(2g-1), we show that every genus g Heegaard splitting of the filled manifold is isotopic to a splitting of the original manifold X. The analogous statement holds for fillings of multiple boundary tori. This gives an effective version of a theorem of Moriah-Rubinstein and Rieck-Sedgwick.Comment: 17 pages. v3 contains minor revisions and cleaner arguments, incorporating referee comments. To appear in Communications in Analysis and Geometr

Links with no exceptional surgeries

We show that if a knot admits a prime, twist-reduced diagram with at least 4 twist regions and at least 6 crossings per twist region, then every non-trivial Dehn filling of that knot is hyperbolike. A similar statement holds for links. We prove this using two arguments, one geometric and one combinatorial. The combinatorial argument further implies that every link with at least 2 twist regions and at least 6 crossings per twist region is hyperbolic and gives a lower bound for the genus of a link.Comment: 28 pages, 15 figures. Minor rewording and organizational changes; also added theorem giving a lower bound on the genus of these link

Treewidth, crushing, and hyperbolic volume

We prove that there exists a universal constant $c$ such that any closed hyperbolic 3-manifold admits a triangulation of treewidth at most $c$ times its volume. The converse is not true: we show there exists a sequence of hyperbolic 3-manifolds of bounded treewidth but volume approaching infinity. Along the way, we prove that crushing a normal surface in a triangulation does not increase the carving-width, and hence crushing any number of normal surfaces in a triangulation affects treewidth by at most a constant multiple.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figures. V2: Section 4 has been rewritten, as the former argument (in V1) used a construction that relied on a wrong theorem. Section 5.1 has also been adjusted to the new construction. Various other arguments have been clarifie

Slopes and colored Jones polynomials of adequate knots

Garoufalidis conjectured a relation between the boundary slopes of a knot and its colored Jones polynomials. According to the conjecture, certain boundary slopes are detected by the sequence of degrees of the colored Jones polynomials. We verify this conjecture for adequate knots, a class that vastly generalizes that of alternating knots.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures. To appear in Proceedings of the AM