Cyclic Dehn surgery and the A-polynomial

Abstract

We present a necessary condition for Dehn surgery on a knot in S 3 to be cyclic which is based on the A-polynomial of the knot. The condition involves a width of the Newton polygon of the A-polynomial, and provides a simple method of computing a list of possible cyclic surgery slopes. The width produces a list of at most three slopes for a hyperbolic knot which contains no closed essential surface in its complement (in agreement with the Cyclic Surgery Theorem). We conclude with an application to cyclic surgeries along non-boundary slopes of hyperbolic mutant knots.