Double coverings of non-orientable Riemann surfaces ramified over discrete sets (Q2255471)

A Riemann surface is a closed topological surface with a holomorphic structure. Thus the surface is orientable. When allowing complex conjugation to intervene in the transition function between charts, the surface can be orientable or non-orientable. This paper concerns non-orientable surfaces, which are called non-orientable unbordered Klein surfaces or, as in the present article, non-orientable Riemann surfaces. The authors define a symmetry of such a surface as a conformal homeomorphism whose set of fixed points contains circles as connected components. These circles are called ovals, and this definition implies that the symmetry is an involution. Besides of the ovals, also isolated points may appear in the fixed set of a symmetry. The main goal of the paper is to obtain an upper bound for the number of non-equivalent double coverings by a given non-orientable Riemann surface \(N\) of genus \(g \geq 3\), ramified over sets with isolated points. The result splits into two cases according to whether the surface \(N\) is symmetric (Theorem 3.1) or not (Corollary 3.2). Besides, these results give the values of \(g\) for which the bound is sharp, as well as the automorphism group of \(N\) in such a case. The analogous result for orientable Riemann surfaces was obtained in [\textit{E. Bujalance} and \textit{G. Gromadzki}, J. Pure Appl. Algebra 146, No. 1, 29--34 (2000; Zbl 0952.30036)], and a minor result of that paper is corrected here.