Riemann surfaces in Stein manifolds with the Density property

Abstract

We show that any open Riemann surface can be properly immersed in any Stein manifold with the (Volume) Density property and of dimension at least 2. If the dimension is at least 3, we can actually choose this immersion to be an embedding. As an application, we show that Stein manifolds with the (Volume) Density property and of dimension at least 3, are characterized among all other complex manifolds by their semigroup of holomorphic endomorphisms.