Carath\'{e}odory balls and proper holomorphic maps on multiply-connected planar domains

TL;DR

This paper investigates the properties of Carathéodory metric balls in multiply-connected planar domains, characterizes proper holomorphic maps onto the disk, and resolves longstanding open problems in complex analysis.

Contribution

It provides an explicit biholomorphic classification of proper maps from finitely-connected domains onto the disk and demonstrates the inequivalence of certain metric balls, addressing questions from 1992 and 2005.

Findings

Proved the inequivalence of closed and open Carathéodory balls in certain domains.

Characterized proper holomorphic maps from finitely-connected domains onto the unit disk.

Extended classical results and introduced a parameter space for these maps.

Abstract

In this paper, we will establish the inequivalence of closed balls and the closure of open balls under the Carath\'{e}odory metric in some planar domains of finite connectivity greater than $2$, and hence resolve a problem posed by Jarnicki, Pflug and Vigu\'{e} in 1992. We also establish a corresponding result for some pseudoconvex domains in $\mathbb{C}^n$ for $n \ge 2$. This result will follow from an explicit characterization (up to biholomorphisms) of proper holomorphic maps from a non-degenerate finitely-connected planar domain, $\Omega$, onto the standard unit disk $\mathbb{D}$ which answers a question posed by Schmieder in 2005. Similar to Bell and Kaleem's characterization of proper holomorphic maps in terms of Grunsky maps (2008), our characterization of proper holomorphic maps from $\Omega$ onto $\mathbb{D}$ is an analogous result to Fatou's famous result that proper holomorphic maps of the unit disk onto itself are finite Blashcke products. Our approach uses a harmonic measure condition of Wang and Yin (2017) on the existence of a proper holomorphic map with prescribed zeros. We will see that certain functions $\eta(\cdot,p)$ play an analogous role to the M\"{o}bius transformations that fix $\mathbb{D}$ in finite Blaschke products. These functions $\eta(\cdot,p)$ map $\Omega$ conformally onto the unit disk with circular arcs (centered at 0) removed and map $p$ to $0$ and can be given in terms of the Schottky-Klein prime function. We also extend a result of Grunsky (1941) and hence introduce a parameter space for proper holomorphic maps from $\Omega$ onto $\mathbb{D}$.