Hyperbolic volume

Knot and link invariant

A hyperbolic link is a link in the 3-sphere whose complement (the space formed by removing the link from the 3-sphere) can be given a complete Riemannian metric of constant negative curvature, giving it the structure of a hyperbolic 3-manifold, a quotient of hyperbolic space by a group acting freely and discontinuously on it. The components of the link will become cusps of the 3-manifold, and the manifold itself will have finite volume. By Mostow rigidity, when a link complement has a hyperbolic structure, this structure is uniquely determined, and any geometric invariants of the structure are also topological invariants of the link. In particular, the hyperbolic volume of the complement is a knot invariant. In order to make it well-defined for all knots or links, the hyperbolic volume of a non-hyperbolic knot or link is often defined to be zero.

There are only finitely many hyperbolic knots for any given volume. A mutation of a hyperbolic knot will have the same volume, so it is possible to concoct examples with equal volumes; indeed, there are arbitrarily large finite sets of distinct knots with equal volumes. In practice, hyperbolic volume has proven very effective in distinguishing knots, utilized in some of the extensive efforts at knot tabulation. Jeffrey Weeks's computer program SnapPea is the ubiquitous tool used to compute hyperbolic volume of a link.