Killing fields in compact Lorentz 3-manifolds (Q1126427)

The geodesic and horocyclic flows on the unit tangent bundle of a hyperbolic surface give examples of Killing fields for Lorentz structures. The author proves that nontrivial (nonequicontinuous) Killing fields for Lorentz metrics in dimension three are all ``derived from'' geodesic or horocyclic flows in the following sense. Let \((M,\phi^t)\) be a smooth nonequicontinuous flow preserving a smooth Lorentz structure on a compact 3-manifold. Then, up to rescaling of the parameter, the flow is smoothly isomorphic to (1) the suspension with return time \(1\) of a toral hyperbolic linear diffeomorphism, or (2) a Ghys flow on the complete Lorentzian space form \(M\) of constant curvature, i.e., for some \(\Gamma\subset \text{PSL}(2,\mathbb{R})\) isomorphic to the fundamental group of a compact surface, a homomorphism \(c:\Gamma\to \mathbb{R}\), and \(f^t\) a hyperbolic or parabolic one-parameter group, the manifold \(M\) is the quotient of \(\text{PSL}(2,\mathbb{R})\) by \(\Gamma'=\text{Graph}(c)=\{(\gamma,c(\gamma))\}\) acting as \(x\to\gamma xf^{-c(\gamma)}\). In particular, \(\Gamma'\) acts freely properly discontinuously on \(\text{PSL}(2,\mathbb{R})\).