Triangulations of fibre-free Haken 3-manifolds

Abstract

It is not known whether there exists a computable function bounding the number of Pachner moves needed to connect any two triangulation of a compact 3-manifold. In this paper we find an explicit bound of this kind for all Haken 3-manifolds which contain no fibred submanifolds as strongly simple pieces of their JSJ-decomposition. The explicit formula for the bound is in terms of the number of tetrahedra in the two triangulations. This implies a conceptually trivial algorithm for recognising any non-fibred knot complement among all 3-manifolds.