Slice regular functions as covering maps and global $star$-roots

The aim of this paper is to prove that a large class of quaternionic slice regular functions result to be (ramified) covering maps. By means of the topological implications of this fact and by providing further topological structures, we are able to give suitable natural conditions for the existence of $k$-th $star$-roots of a slice regular function. Moreover, we are also able to compute all the solutions which, quite surprisingly, in the most general case, are in number of $k^2$. The last part is devoted to compute the monodromy and to present a technique to compute all the $k^2$ roots starting from one of them.