Liouville and Carath\'eodory coverings in Riemannian and complex geometry (Q4400746)

A Riemannian manifold (respectively a complex space) \(X\) is called Liouville if it carries no nonconstant bounded harmonic (respectively holomorphic) function. It is called Carathéodory, or Carathéodory hyperbolic, if bounded harmonic (respectively holomorphic) functions separate the points of \(X\). A Galois covering \(X\) with Galois group \(G\) is called a \(G\)-covering. In this paper, the authors are interested in the following problem: When is a \(G\)-covering over a Liouville base \(Y\) Liouville, or at least, when is it not Carathéodory hyperbolic? The paper contains a survey of known results together with some new results on the subject. Previous results of Lyons-Sullivan and of the first author show that to ensure the Liouville property of \(X\) one has to impose strong conditions on \(Y\), and for this reason the authors assume here that \(Y\) is compact, or at least, that \(Y\) does not carry non-constant bounded subharmonic (respectively plurisubharmonic) functions. The authors show in particular, as a consequence of theorems of Varopoulos and of Lyons-Sullivan, that a \(G\)-covering over a compact Riemannian (respectively Kähler) manifold is Liouville if \(G\) is an extension of an almost nilpotent group by \(\mathbb{Z}\) or \(\mathbb{Z}^2\). They give then examples of non-Liouville and, especially, of Carathéodory hyperbolic cocompact coverings with relatively small Galois groups. Using again a construction of Lyons-Sullivan, they produce, on any compact Riemann surface of genus \( \geq 2\), a Carathéodory hyperbolic two-step solvable covering. The authors consider then the universal covering \(X\to {\mathcal I}\) of an Inoue surface. (These surfaces were introduced by \textit{M. Inoue} in [Invent. Math. 24, 269-310 (1974; Zbl 0283.32019)]). The surface \({\mathcal I}\) considered here is a non-Kähler compact complex surface with a polycyclic fundamental group, and \(X\) is neither Liouville nor Carathéodory. The authors show that \(X\) admits bounded holomorphic functions which are nonconstant on the orbits of suitable infinite conjugacy classes in \(\pi_1(G)\). For the entire collection see [Zbl 0997.00561].