Persistent laminations from Seifert surfaces

Abstract

A persistent lamination for a knot K is an essential lamination in the complement of K, which remains essential after every non-trivial Dehn surgery along K. Having a persistent lamination implies, for example, that every manifold obtained by non-trivial Dehn surgery along K has universal cover R^3. In this paper we present a method for building persistent laminations for knots from an incompressible Seifert surface for some `parent' knot. Using this construction, we can, for example, currently build persistent laminations for approximately 45 percent of the knots in the standard knot tables; see page 12 of the paper, or http://www.math.unt.edu/~britten/ldt/knots/knotlst1.html, for the exact list.