Excellent three-manifold

In the orientable case an excellent compact three-manifold is an irreducible three-manifold and a boundary-irreducible three-manifold, is not a ball, contains a two-sided properly embedded incompressible surface, and has every properly embedded incompressible zero-Euler characteristic surface a boundary-parallel surface. In particular it has no essential annulus or torus. These properties give lower bounds on the Thurston norm of classes with essential boundary.

In a compact connected orientable three-manifold with no spherical boundary components, every embedded knot is homotopic to a knot with an excellent three-manifold as exterior. In particular this can preserve the generator class in $S^1\times S^2$, or the winding number of a satellite pattern one class in a solid torus. Homotopy here is weaker than isotopy.