Embedded complex curves in the affine plane

Abstract

This paper brings several contributions to the classical Forster-Bell-Narasimhan conjecture and the Yang problem concerning the existence of proper and almost proper (hence complete) injective holomorphic immersions of open Riemann surfaces in the affine plane $\mathbb C^2$ satisfying interpolation and hitting conditions. We also show that in every compact Riemann surface there is a Cantor set whose complement admits a proper holomorphic embedding in $\mathbb C^2$. The focal point is a lemma saying the following. Given a compact bordered Riemann surface, $M$, a closed discrete subset $E$ of its interior $\mathring M=M\setminus bM$, a compact subset $K\subset \mathring M\setminus E$ without holes in $\mathring M$, and a $\mathscr C^1$ embedding $f:M\hookrightarrow \mathbb C^2$ which is holomorphic in $\mathring M$, we can approximate $f$ uniformly on $K$ by a holomorphic embedding $F:M\hookrightarrow \mathbb C^2$ which maps $E\cup bM$ out of a given ball and satisfies some interpolation conditions.