Spectral maps associated to semialgebraic branched coverings.

In this article we prove that a semialgebraic map is a branched covering if and only if its associated spectral map is a branched covering. In addition, such spectral map has a neat behavior with respect to the branching locus, the ramification set and the ramification index. A crucial result to prove this is the characterization of the prime ideals whose fiber under the previous spectral map is a singleton.