Essential tori admitting a standard tiling
Volume 189 / 2006
Abstract
Birman and Menasco (1994) introduced and studied a class of embedded tori in closed braid complements which admit a standard tiling. The geometric description of the tori from this class was not complete. Ng showed (1988) that each essential torus in a closed braid complement which admits a standard tiling possesses a staircase tiling pattern.
In this paper, we introduce and study the so-called longitude-meridional patterns for essential tori admitting a standard tiling. A longitude-meridional pattern of an essential torus can be derived from the corresponding tiled torus and carries a portion of geometric information about the embedded torus. We also study the interplay between the geometry of essential embedded tori and combinatorics of the corresponding tiled tori.
