Bordered surfaces in the 3-sphere with maximum symmetry

Abstract

We consider orientation-preserving actions of finite groups $G$ on pairs $(S^3,\Sigma )$, where $\Sigma$ denotes a compact connected surface embedded in $S^3$. In a previous paper, we considered the case of closed, necessarily orientable surfaces, determined for each genus $g>1$ the maximum order of such a $G$ for all embeddings of a surface of genus $g$, and classified the corresponding embeddings. In the present paper we obtain analogous results for the case of bordered surfaces $\Sigma$ (i.e. with non-empty boundary, orientable or not). Now the genus $g$ gets replaced by the algebraic genus $\alpha$ of $\Sigma$ (the rank of its free fundamental group); for each $\alpha >1$ we determine the maximum order $m_{\alpha }$ of an action of $G$, classify the topological types of the corresponding surfaces (topological genus, number of boundary components, orientability) and their embeddings into $S^3$. For example, the maximal possibility $12(\alpha -1)$ is obtained for the finitely many values $\alpha =2,3,4,5,9,11,25,97,121$ and $241$.

20 pages, to appear in J. Pure Appl. Algebra. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1510.00822