Thurston’s spinning construction and solutions to the hyperbolic gluing equations for closed hyperbolic 3–manifolds

Abstract

We show that the hyperbolic structure on a closed, orientable, hyperbolic 3–manifold can be constructed from a solution to the hyperbolic gluing equations using any triangulation with essential edges. The key ingredients in the proof are Thurston’s spinning construction and a volume rigidity result attributed by Dunfield to Thurston, Gromov and Goldman. As an application, we show that this gives a new algorithm to detect hyperbolic structures and small Seifert fibred structures on closed 3–manifolds.