Representing open 3-manifolds as 3-fold branched coverings (Q1870107)

A well known result of Hilden and, independently, of the author says that every closed, connected, orientable \(3\)-manifold is a \(3\)-fold simple cover of the \(3\)-sphere, branched over a knot. In the paper under review, the author extends this result to the case of open, connected, orientable \(3\)-manifolds by proving the following theorem: Every open, connected, orientable \(3\)-manifold is the \(3\)-fold simple cover of the complement of a tame subset in the \(3\)-sphere, such that the branching set is a locally finite, disjoint union of properly embedded arcs. Such a cover is in fact the restriction to the open manifold of a \(3\)-fold simple cover of its Freudental compactification onto the \(3\)-sphere. An open \(3\)-manifold can be represented by a tree where each vertex is a compact manifold with boundary and each edge is a connected boundary component. The proof then reduces to a local problem (i.e., to construct \(3\)-fold simple covers for compact manifolds with boundary) and a gluing problem (i.e., to make the covers match along the common boundary components). The local problem is solved by a lemma, which is of interest on its own right: every compact, oriented \(3\)-manifold with \(n>0\) boundary components is a \(3\)-fold simple cover of the \(3\)-sphere minus \(n\) \(3\)-balls, in such a way that each boundary component is a \(3\)-fold simple cover of one boundary sphere and the branched set consists of properly embedded disjoint arcs. The author remarks that the main result of the paper is not true if one asks the order of the covering to be \(2\) instead of \(3\). However, in the final part of the paper, sufficient conditions for this to be the case are given, namely the fact is true locally (i.e., on the connected components of the decomposition of the manifold) and the different covers can be glued together (this is ensured when the genera of the boundary surfaces of the connected components of the decomposition are at most \(2\)).