The covers of a complexified real arrangement of hyperplanes and their fundamental groups (Q1313924)

Let \(V\) be a finite dimensional real vector space and let \({\mathcal A}\) be an arrangement of hyperplanes in \(V\). We denote by \(V_ \mathbb{C}\) the complexification of \(V\), by \({\mathcal A}_ \mathbb{C} = \{H_ \mathbb{C} = \mathbb{C} \otimes H | H \in {\mathcal A}\}\) the complexification of \({\mathcal A}\), and by \(M({\mathcal A})\) the complement in \(V_ \mathbb{C}\) of the union of all elements of \({\mathcal A}_ \mathbb{C}\). We associate with \({\mathcal A}\) an oriented graph \(\Gamma ({\mathcal A})\) and some equivalence relation \(\sim\) in the set of (nonoriented) paths of \(\Gamma ({\mathcal A})\). The pair \((\Gamma ({\mathcal A}),\sim)\) is called the oriented system associated with \({\mathcal A}\). We introduce the notion of a cover of \((\Gamma ({\mathcal A}), \sim)\), from any cover of \((\Gamma ({\mathcal A}), \sim)\) we explicitly construct a cover of \(M({\mathcal A})\), we prove that every cover of \(M({\mathcal A})\) can be obtained in this way and that a cover of \((\Gamma ({\mathcal A}), \sim)\) is completely determined by the associated cover of \(M({\mathcal A})\). In particular, this method gives a construction of the universal cover of \(M({\mathcal A})\).