On 2-Systoles of Hyperbolic 3-Manifolds

Abstract

We investigate the geometry of π ₁-injective surfaces in closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds. First we prove that for any ${\epsilon > 0}$, if the manifold M has sufficiently large systole sys₁(M), the genus of any such surface in M is bounded below by ${{\rm exp}((\frac{1}{2} - \epsilon){\rm sys}_1(M))}$. Using this result we show, in particular, that for congruence covers M _i → M of a compact arithmetic hyperbolic 3-manifold we have: (a) the minimal genus of π ₁-injective surfaces satisfies ${{\rm log} \, {\rm sysg}(M_i) \gtrsim \frac{1}{3} {\rm log} \, {\rm vol}(M_i) ; (b)}$ there exist such sequences with the ratio Heegard ${{\rm genus}(M_i)/{\rm sysg}(M_i) \gtrsim {\rm vol}(M_i)^{1/2}}$ ; and (c) under some additional assumptions π ₁(M _i ) is k-free with ${{\rm log} \, k \gtrsim \frac{1}{3}{\rm sys}_1(M_i)}$. The latter resolves a special case of a conjecture of Gromov.