Drilling veering triangulations with applications to pseudo-Anosov flows

Abstract: We develop an algorithm that takes as input a veering triangulation V and a flow cycle c of V, and outputs a veering parent V_c of V. Constructing veering parents combinatorializes drilling out closed orbits of transitive pseudo-Anosov flows. The algorithm relies on locally approximating the structure of the loom space associated to V in sufficient detail to carry out a certain modification of the Agol-Guéritaud construction. We use an implementation of the drilling algorithm to construct layered parents of non-layered veering triangulations (and hence Birkhoff sections for transitive pseudo-Anosov flows) and geometric parents of non-geometric veering triangulations. We also find closed orbits of (drilled) pseudo-Anosov flows that are not ambiently isotopic to the geodesics in their free homotopy classes, and show that certain veering triangulations encode almost orbit equivalent flows. In particular, we provide new computational evidence for a conjecture of Ghys asserting that all transitive Anosov flows with orientable invariant foliations are almost orbit equivalent.