On the universal cover of certain exotic Kähler surfaces of negative curvature (Q1890242)

Around 1980, G. D. Mostow and Y. T. Siu constructed the first example of a compact 4-dimensional Riemannian manifold with negative curvature not diffeomorphic to any locally symmetric space. In this article the author studies a class of examples of negatively curved compact Kähler surfaces that are not diffeomorphic to any locally symmetric space. From the analysis of certain totally geodesic curves on these surfaces the author deduces that, for infinitely many examples, the natural representation of the fundamental group in PU(2,1) is non-faithful. The author also provides a new construction of bounded holomorphic functions on the universal cover of the surfaces based on lifting maps to compact Riemann surfaces.