On Hyperbolic 3-Orbifolds of Small Volume and Small Heegaard Genus

Abstract

In the present note we shall give geometric descriptions of the orientable hyperbolic 3-orbifolds of smallest known volumes. As in the case of hyperbolic 3-manifolds, the hyperbolic 3-orbifolds of smallest volumes are still not known but there is some evidence that our list should be complete (however in some cases the volumes have not yet been computed). We note that the natural candidates for the ten orientable hyperbolic 3-manifolds of smallest volumes have been described in [6] (all of Heegaard genus two). In the following, we shall consider only orientable orbifolds. Computations of volumes are based on the recent papers [11], [9] and [14].