The Calabi-Yau problem, null curves, and Bryant surfaces (Q889942)

From the authors' abstract: The authors prove that every bordered Riemann surface \(M\) admits a complete proper null holomorphic embedding into a ball of the complex Euclidean 3-space \(\mathbb C^3\). The real part of such an embedding is a complete conformal minimal immersion \(M\to\mathbb R^3\) with bounded image. (Recall that an immersion \(F=(F_1,F_2,F_3): M\to\mathbb C^3\) is null holomorphic if it is directed by the conical quadric variety \(\{z^2_1+ z^2_2+ z^2_3= 0\}\).) For any such \(M\) they also construct proper null holomorphic embeddings \(M\hookrightarrow \mathbb C^3\) with a bounded coordinate function; these give rise to properly embedded null curves \(M\hookrightarrow \mathrm{SL}_2(\mathbb C)\) and to properly immersed Bryant surfaces \(M\to\mathbb H^3\) in the hyperbolic 3-space. In particular, the authors provide the first examples of proper Bryant surfaces with finite topology and of hyperbolic conformal type. The main novelty when compared to the existing results in the literature is that they work with a fixed conformal structure on \(M\). This is accomplished by introducing a conceptually new method based on complex analytic techniques. One of the main tools is an approximate solution to certain Riemann-Hilbert boundary value problems for null curves in \(\mathbb C^3\), developed in Section 3.