Many cusped hyperbolic 3-manifolds do not bound geometrically

Abstract

In this note, we show that there exist cusped hyperbolic $3$-manifolds that embed geodesically, but cannot bound geometrically. Thus, being a geometric boundary is a non-trivial property for such manifolds. Our result complements the work by Long and Reid on geometric boundaries of compact hyperbolic $4$-manifolds, and by Kolpakov, Reid and Slavich on embedding arithmetic hyperbolic manifolds.