Examples of surfaces with canonical map of maximal degree (Q2238938)

The authors give many examples of surfaces of general type whose canonical map is generically finite of degree \(36\): by a result of \textit{A. Beauville} [Invent. Math. 55, 121--140 (1979; Zbl 0403.14006)] it is known that \(36\) is an upper bound and is reached by a surface \(M\) if and only if it is isomorphic to a smooth ball quotient \(\mathbb{B}^2_\mathbb{C}/\Sigma\) with \(p_g(M)=3\), \(q(M)=0\) and the linear system of the canonical bundle is base point free. A surface such that the canonical morphism has degree \(36\) is called of maximal canonical degree. The second author was the first to present an explicit example of such a surface in [\textit{S.-K. Yeung}, Math. Ann. 368, No. 3--4, 1171--1189 (2017; Zbl 1390.14119)]: this is constructed as an étale \(C_2\times C_2\)-Galois cover of a fake projective plane whose automorphism group is isomorphic to \(C_7:C_3\) (the unique non-abelian group of order \(21\)). From the already mentioned result of Beauville, an easy computation on the invariants shows that if a surface of maximal canonical degree is an étale cover of degree \(d\) of a fake projective plane then \(d=4\). That is why the authors study all Galois étale covers of degree \(4\) of fake projective planes, showing, for examples, that these surfaces are regular and have canonical bundle whose base locus has at most isolated singularities. Then they show that all the Galois étale degree-four covers of a certain class of fake projective planes whose auotomorphism group is \(C_7:C_3\) have maximal canonical degree. Notice that the previous example of such a surface give in [\textit{S.-K. Yeung}, Math. Ann. 368, No. 3--4, 1171--1189 (2017; Zbl 1390.14119)] falls into this class of example but there in the proof it is used that the surface studied has Picard number one, while for the general case here treated, this information is not known. As a final Corollary, the authors remark that taking \(Y\) as the product of a surface \(M\) of maximal canonical degree as above and a hyperelliptic curve \(C\), then the canonical degree of \(Y\) is \(72\). This result is interesting because in [\textit{J.-X. Cai}, Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 136, No. 5, 1565--1574 (2008; Zbl 1132.14037)] it is shown that, if the geometric genus of a \(3\)-fold \(Y\) is sufficiently large, then the canonical degree is at most \(72\). Notice althugh that there could exist surfaces of greater canonical degree as in general the upper bound is \(360\) by [\textit{R. Du} and \textit{Y. Gao}, Geom. Dedicata 185, 123--130 (2016; Zbl 1391.14077)].