Essential laminations and immersed essential surfaces in 3-manifolds

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AbstractAward: DMS-0102316Principal Investigator: Tao LiEssential laminations and immersed essential surfaces are twoimportant objects in 3-manifolds. They generalize embeddedincompressible surfaces, and are remarkably useful in obtainingtopological and geometric information of 3-manifolds. The maingoal of this project is to explore the relationships between thetopology of 3-manifolds and these two objects. The tools thatthe investigator will use include branched surfaces and immersedbranched surfaces that have been proved to be extremely useful inthe investigator's previous work. The investigator intends tocontinue his research on essential laminations and immersedsurfaces with the following goals. (1) To construct essentiallaminations in 3-manifolds obtained from Dehn surgery onhyperbolic knots. The techniques to be developed in thisresearch could potentially have great impact on some famousconjectures in knot theory, e.g., Property P for knots and thecabling conjecture. (2) To find an algorithm to decide whether a3-manifold is a Seifert fiber space. The investigator intends touse immersed branched surfaces and normal surface theory to finda practical algorithm. (3) To show that two homotopy equivalent3-manifolds, which contain essential laminations, arehomeomorphic. (4) To find an algorithm to decide whether a3-manifold contains an essential lamination.Three-manifolds are objects modeled on the 3-dimensional spacethat we are living in. These objects can be found in many othersciences, such as physics, biology, and chemistry. A geometricway of studying 3-manifolds, which is extremely fruitful, is toview a 3-manifold as a collection of 3-dimensional pieces gluedtogether along 2-dimensional surfaces. The investigator plans tostudy the structure of 3-manifolds using such 2-dimensionalsurfaces, which are called essential laminations and immersedessential surfaces. The research in this project is related toknot theory, which has helped to understand the structure of DNA;it is also related to hyperbolic geometry, which has been used byphysicists to understand the universe.