A lower bound for the volumes of modular link complements

Abstract

Every finite collection of oriented closed geodesics in the modular surface has a canonically associated link in its unit tangent bundle coming from the periodic orbits of the geodesic flow. We study the volume of the associated link complement with respect to its unique complete hyperbolic metric. We provide the first lower volume bound that is linear in terms of the number of distinct exponents in the code words corresponding to the collection of closed geodesics.