Deformation of canonical morphisms and the moduli of surfaces of general type (Q993384)

The authors study the deformation theory for morphisms to projective spaces that are finite onto their images. Using this technique they can construct new surfaces with birational, and sometimes also finite, canonical morphism. The construction of these surfaces, which is different form the ones used till now, follows three steps: - consider a smooth surface \(Y\) with a simple structure; - construct a finite cover of \(Y\) with the desired invariants; - deform this cover to a finite morphism. This result allows the authors to construct new components of the moduli of surfaces of general type. They construct moduli spaces having one component who general point corresponds to a surface canonically embedded, and another component whose general point is ''hyperelliptic'', i.e. its canonical morphism is a degree two morphism.