A strong Oka principle for embeddings of some planar domains into \(\mathbb C\times\mathbb C^\ast\) (Q1948724)

The author shows that a strong version of the Oka principle holds for maps from certain Riemann surfaces called circular domains into \(\mathbb C \times \mathbb C^*\), namely every continuous mapping from such a domain is homotopic to a proper holomorphic embedding. An important ingredient of the proof is a generalization to \(\mathbb C \times\mathbb C^*\) of results of \textit{F. Forstnerič} and \textit{E. F. Wold} [J. Math. Pures Appl. (9) 91, No. 1, 100--114 (2009; Zbl 1157.32010)] on proper embeddings of open Riemann surfaces into \(\mathbb C^2,\) with a result on the homotopy class of the embedding. The author also gives a complete solution to the existence of acyclic embeddings of Riemann surfaces with abelian fundamental groups.