The search for exotic knot traces

Abstract

Two distinct knots are said to be friends if their complements, filled along the 0-slope, produce diffeomorphic 3-manifolds. In this article, we develop a practical algorithm, implemented using SnapPy and Regina, to search for a friend of a given knot. As an application, we construct a census of simple knots that admit friends and use these data to formulate conjectures about knot friends.