Detecting Incompressibility of Boundary in 3-Manifolds

A construction is presented which can be utilized to prove incompressibility of boundary in a 3-manifold W. One constructs a new 3-manifold DW by doubling W along a subsurface in its boundary. If DW is hyperbolic, and if W has compressible boundary, then DW must have a longitude of 'length' less than 4. This can be applied to show that an arc that is a candidate for an unknotting tunnel in a 3-manifold cannot be an unknotting tunnel. It can also be used to show that a 'tubed surface' is incompressible. For knot and link complements in S ³, and an unknotting tunnel, DW is almost always hyperbolic. Empirically, this construction appears to provide a surprisingly effective procedure for demonstrating that specific arcs are not unknotting tunnels.