A strong Oka principle for embeddings of some planar domains into CxC*

Gromov, in his seminal 1989 paper on the Oka principle, introduced the notion of an elliptic manifold and proved that every continuous map from a Stein manifold to an elliptic manifold is homotopic to a holomorphic map. We show that a much stronger Oka principle holds in the special case of maps from certain open Riemann surfaces called circular domains into CxC*, namely that every continuous map is homotopic to a proper holomorphic embedding. An important ingredient is a generalisation to CxC* of recent results of Wold and Forstneric on the long-standing problem of properly embedding open Riemann surfaces into C^2, with an additional result on the homotopy class of the embeddings. We also give a complete solution to a question that arises naturally in Larusson's holomorphic homotopy theory, of the existence of acyclic embeddings of Riemann surfaces with abelian fundamental group into 2-dimensional elliptic Stein manifolds.