SMALL CURVATURE SURFACES IN HYPERBOLIC 3-MANIFOLDS
In a paper of Menasco and Reid, it is conjectured that there exist no hyperbolic knots in S3 for which the complement contains a closed embedded totally geodesic surface. In this note, we show that one can get "as close as possible" to a counter-example. Specifically, we construct a sequence of hyperbolic knots {Kn} with complements containing closed embedded essential surfaces having principal curvatures converging to zero as n tends to infinity. We also construct a family of two-component links for which the complements contain closed embedded totally geodesic surfaces of arbitrarily large genera. In addition, we prove that a closed embedded surface with sufficiently small principal curvatures is not only quasi-Fuchsian (a result of Thurston's), but it is also either acylindrical or the boundary of a twisted I-bundle.