Immersing quasi-Fuchsian surfaces of odd Euler characteristic in closed hyperbolic $3$-manifolds

Abstract

In this paper, it is shown that every closed hyperbolic $3$-manifold contains an immersed quasi-Fuchsian closed subsurface of odd Euler characteristic. The construction adopts the good pants method, and the primary new ingredient is an enhanced version of the connection principle, which allows one to connect any two frames with a path of frames in a prescribed relative homology class of the frame bundle. The existence result is applied to show that every uniform lattice of $\mathrm{PSL}(2, \mathbb{C})$ admits an exhausting nested sequence of sublattices with exponential homological torsion growth. However, the constructed sublattices are not normal in general.