Random 3-Manifolds Have No Totally Geodesic Submanifolds

Abstract

Murphy and the second author showed that a generic closed Riemannian manifold has no totally geodesic submanifolds, provided it is at least four dimensional. Lytchak and Petrunin established the same thing in dimension 3. For the higher dimensional result, the generic set is open and dense in the $C^{q}$--topology for any $% q\geq 2.$ In Lytchak and Petrunin's work, the generic set is a dense $G_{\delta }$ in the $C^{q}$-topology for any $q\geq 2.$ Here we show that the set of such metrics on a compact $3$-manifold contains a set that is open and dense in the $C^{q}$-topology for any $q\geq 3.$