Goeritz groups of bridge decompositions

Abstract

For a bridge decomposition of a link in the 3-sphere, we define the Goeritz group to be the group of isotopy classes of orientationpreserving homeomorphisms of the 3-sphere that preserve each of the bridge sphere and link setwise. After describing basic properties of this group, we discuss the asymptotic behavior of the minimal pseudo-Anosov entropies. This gives an application to the asymptotic behavior of the minimal entropies for the original Goeritz groups of Heegaard splittings of the 3-sphere and the real projective space.