Spacelike metric foliations (Q1962802)

Consider a spacetime which is foliated by spacelike submanifolds. The foliation is metric if its leaves are locally the fibres of local semi-Riemannian submersions. It satisfies the strong energy condition if its vertical Ricci curvature is nonnegative on timelike vectors. An old result from \textit{R. K. Sachs} and \textit{H. Wu} [`General relativity for mathematicians' (GTM 48, Springer, New York) (1977; Zbl 0373.53001)] says that any metric foliation by spacelike hypersurfaces of a timelike complete spacetime \(M\) satisfying the strong energy condition splits, i.e., \(M\) is locally isometric to the product of an interval with a Riemannian manifold, equipped with the standard product foliation. In this paper, the author considers metric foliations of codimension two of a timelike complete spacetime \(M\) satisfying the strong energy condition. He shows that such foliations are totally geodesic and that every point of the spacetime is contained in a flat totally geodesic rectangle. (This result can be extended to Lorentzian manifolds of arbitrary dimension.) Moreover, if the vertical Ricci curvature vanishes on timelike vectors, then the spacetime decomposes locally in a product of two factors, the leaves of the foliation being tangent to the Riemannian factor.