Dehn filling and the geometry of unknotting tunnels

Daryl Cooper, David Futer, Jessica S. Purcell

Published 2011-05-17, updated 2013-03-11Version 3

Any one-cusped hyperbolic manifold M with an unknotting tunnel tau is obtained by Dehn filling a cusp of a two-cusped hyperbolic manifold. In the case where M is obtained by "generic" Dehn filling, we prove that tau is isotopic to a geodesic, and characterize whether tau is isotopic to an edge in the canonical decomposition of M. We also give explicit estimates (with additive error only) on the length of tau relative to a maximal cusp. These results give generic answers to three long-standing questions posed by Adams, Sakuma, and Weeks. We also construct an explicit sequence of one-tunnel knots in S^3, all of whose unknotting tunnels have length approaching infinity.