Coincidence Wecken homotopies versus Wecken homotopies relative to a fixed homotopy in one of the maps. II (Q694674)

Given two maps \(f, g: M\to N\) between two spaces, the set of coincidences of the pair \((f,g)\) is the subset of \(M\) consisting of the points which have the same image under \(f\) and \(g\). A pair \((f,g)\) of maps is said to be minimal (for coincidence) if it achieves the minimal number of coincidences among all pairs of maps in its homotopy class. There are two related questions one can ask. (1) If two homotopic pairs \((f_1, g_1)\) and \((f_2, g_2)\) are both minimal, is there a homotopy \((H, G)\) from \((f_1, g_1)\) to \((f_2, g_2)\) such that \((H_t, G_t)\) is minimal in each stage of \(t\in I\)? (2) If two homotopic pairs \((f_1, g_1)\) and \((f_2, g_2)\) are both minimal and a homotopy \(G\) from \(g_1\) to \(g_2\) is given, is there a homotopy \(H\) from \(f_1\) to \(f_2\) such that \((H_t, G_t)\) is minimal? These are just the two issues indicated in the title of the paper under review. It is obvious that the answer to the second question must be negative if the answer to the first one is negative. The authors are interested in deciding for which cases the answer to the second question is positive if the answer to the first one is positive. In other words, the answers to both questions are the same. This paper is a continuation of their series of works on this subject, see e.g. [Topology Appl. 157, No. 10--11, 1770--1783 (2010; Zbl 1194.55004)]. Here, the authors consider the problem above when the domain \(M\) and target space \(N\) are both closed surfaces, and obtain some sufficient conditions to guarantee that the answers to the two above questions are the same. Moreover, they give many examples showing the cases where the two answers are different. The main tool involved is the surface braid group.