Global hyperbolicity and Palais-Smale condition for action functionals in stationary spacetimes (Q2483178): Difference between revisions

From the author's abstract: In order to apply variational methods to the action functional for geodesics of a stationary space-time, some hypotheses, useful to obtain the classical Palais-Smale condition, are commonly used: pseudo-coercivity, bounds on certain coefficients of the metric, etc. We prove that these technical assumptions admit a natural interpretation for conformal structure (causality) of the manifold. As a consequence, any stationary space-time with complete time-like Killing vector field and a complete Cauchy hypersurface (thus, globally hyperbolic), is proved to be a geodesically connected.