Non-peripheral ideal decompositions of alternating knots

Abstract: An ideal triangulation $\mathcal{T}$ of a hyperbolic 3-manifold $M$ with one cusp is non-peripheral if no edge of $\mathcal{T}$ is homotopic to a curve in the boundary torus of $M$. For such a triangulation, the gluing and completeness equations can be solved to recover the hyperbolic structure of $M$. A planar projection of a knot gives four ideal cell decompositions of its complement (minus 2 balls), two of which are ideal triangulations that use 4 (resp., 5) ideal tetrahedra per crossing. Our main result is that these ideal triangulations are non-peripheral for all planar, reduced, alternating projections of hyperbolic knots. Our proof uses the small cancellation properties of the Dehn presentation of alternating knot groups, and an explicit solution to their word and conjugacy problems. In particular, we describe a planar complex that encodes all geodesic words that represent elements of the peripheral subgroup of an alternating knot group. This gives a polynomial time algorithm for checking if an element in an alternating knot group is peripheral. Our motivation for this work comes from the Volume Conjecture for knots.