Every bordered Riemann surface is a complete proper curve in a ball (Q378842)

The paper concerns the question on the existence of bounded complex submanifolds of \(\mathbb C^n\), \(n>1\), that are complete with respect to the Riemannian metric induced from the standard Euclidean metric of \(\mathbb C^n\). The main results are the following. Theorem 1. Every bordered Riemannian surface admits a complete proper holomorphic immersion to the unit ball of \(\mathbb C^2\) and a complete proper holomorphic embedding to the unit ball of \(\mathbb C^3\). Theorem 2. Let \(\mathcal R\) be a bordered Riemann surface. Every holomorphic map \(f: \overline{\mathcal R} \to \mathbb C^n\), \(n >1\), can be approximated, uniformly on compacta in \(\mathcal R\), by complete proper holomorphic immersions (embeddings if \(n>2\)) into any open ball in \(\mathbb C^n\) that contains the image \(f(\overline{\mathcal R})\). We stress the fact that there exist other similar results, as e.g. those in [\textit{A. Alarcón} and \textit{F. J. López}, Math. Ann. 355, No. 2, 429--455 (2013; Zbl 1269.53061)], which give the existence of proper holomorphic immersions of Riemann surfaces with prescribed topological properties. But such previous results are not useful when one needs to control the immersion under the assumption that also the Riemann surface structure is prescribed. A corollary on proper holomorphic immersions of bordered Riemann surfaces in Stein manifold and interesting open problems are also given.