Twist number and the alternating volume of knots

Abstract

It was previously shown by the first author that every knot in [Formula: see text] is ambient isotopic to one component of a two-component, alternating, hyperbolic link. In this paper, we define the alternating volume of a knot [Formula: see text] to be the minimum volume of any link [Formula: see text] in a natural class of alternating, hyperbolic links such that [Formula: see text] is ambient isotopic to a component of [Formula: see text]. Our main result shows that the alternating volume of a knot is coarsely equivalent to the twist number of a knot.