Exceptional Dehn surgery on the minimally twisted five-chain link

Abstract

We consider in this paper the minimally twisted chain link with 5 components in the 3-sphere, and we analyze the Dehn surgeries on it, namely the Dehn fillings on its exterior M5. The 3-manifold M5 is a nicely symmetric hyperbolic one, filling which one gets a wealth of hyperbolic 3-manifolds having 4 or fewer (including 0) cusps. In view of Thurston's hyperbolic Dehn filling theorem it is then natural to face the problem of classifying all the exceptional fillings on M5, namely those yielding non-hyperbolic 3-manifolds. Here we completely solve this problem, also showing that, thanks to the symmetries of M5 and of some hyperbolic manifolds resulting from fillings of M5, the set of exceptional fillings on M5 is described by a very small amount of information.