Polygons of the Lorentzian plane and spherical simplexes (Q2515079): Difference between revisions

In the paper, the author studies a class of noncompact plane polygons, called \(t\)-convex polygons. These polygons are described in term of Lorentz geometry on a Lorentz plane. Let \((\eta_1,\dots,\eta_n)\) be pairwise distinct unit future time-like vectors in a Lorentz plane and \(h_i>0, i=1,\dots,n\) be positive numbers. A \(t\)-convex polygon \(P\) is the intersection of half-planes bounded by the lines \(H^k_t(h_i\eta_i)^{\perp},k\in\mathbb Z,i=1,\dots,n\), where \[ H_t=\begin{pmatrix} \cosh t&\sinh t \cr \sinh t &\cosh t \end{pmatrix}, \] \[ a^{\perp}=\{x\in\mathbb R^2:\langle x,a\rangle=\langle a,a\rangle\}, \] \(\langle\;,\;\rangle\) is the Lorentz metric and the half planes are chosen such that \(\eta_i\) are inward pointing. Every \(t\)-convex polygon is an intersection of elementary \(t\)-convex polygons and the author considers polygons given by intersection of a minimal number \(m\) of elementary \(t\)-convex polygons. A parameter space of the class of these polygons is a cone in the \(m\)-dimensional vector space \(\mathbb R^m\) and the author defines a co-area function for these polygons which turns out to be a positive definite quadratic form on \(\mathbb R^m\). Restricting to polygons of coarea 1, the author gets a subset of the unit sphere in the parameter space. The author shows that this subset is a spherical orthoscheme. On the other hand, every spherical orthoscheme can be obtained in this way.