A bound on the number of twice-punctured tori in a knot exterior

Abstract

This paper continues a program due to Motegi regarding universal bounds for the number of non-isotopic essential $n$-punctured tori in the complement of a hyperbolic knot in $S^3$. For $n=1$, Valdez-S\'anchez showed that there are at most five non-isotopic Seifert tori in the exterior of a hyperbolic knot. In this paper, we address the case $n=2$. We show that there are at most six non-isotopic, nested, essential 2-holed tori in the complement of every hyperbolic knot.