Dehn surgeries on knots which yield lens spaces and genera of knots

Goda Hiroshi

Teragaito Masakazu

Mathematical proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society

It is an interesting open question when Dehn surgery on a knot in the 3-sphere S3 can produce a lens space (see [10, 12]). Some studies have been made for special knots; in particular, the question is completely solved for torus knots [21] and satellite knots [3, 29, 31]. It is known that there are many examples of hyperbolic knots which admit Dehn surgeries yielding lens spaces. For example, Fintushel and Stern [8] have shown that 18- and 19-surgeries on the ([minus sign]2, 3, 7)-pretzel knot give lens spaces L(18, 5) and L(19, 7), respectively. However, there seems to be no essential progress on hyperbolic knots. It might be a reason that some famous classes of hyperbolic knots, such as 2-bridge knots [26], alternating knots [5], admit no surgery yielding lens spaces.In this paper we focus on the genera of knots to treat the present condition methodically and show that there is a constraint on the order of the fundamental group of the resulting lens space obtained by Dehn surgery on a hyperbolic knot. Also, this new standpoint enables us to present a conjecture concerning such a constraint, which holds for all known examples.

Mathematics [ 410 ]

eng

Cambridge University Press

Copyright (c) 2000 Cambridge University Press

[ISSN] 0305-0041

[DOI] 10.1017/S0305004100004692

[DOI] http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0305004100004692 isVersionOf