Compact null hypersurfaces in Lorentzian manifolds (Q2035031)

In this paper the authors exhibit new results on the existence and various geometric and causal properties of compact null hypersurfaces in Lorentzian manifolds. Recall that in a Lorentzian manifold \((M,g)\) a submanifold \(N\) is called \textit{null} if the Lorentzian metric \(g\vert_N\) restricted to this submanifold is degenerate. This degeneracy, among other things, implies that the normal bundle of \(N\) is tangent to \(N\) hence the usual projection techniques applicable to submanifolds (to obtain induced connection, etc.) do not work here; consequently studying null submanifolds in Lorentzian manifolds requires special techniques. Despite this difficulty, from the physical viewpoint, null hypersurfaces are important because they describe black hole event horizons and their properties contain information about the global causal structure of the ambient spacetime, too. In this paper the authors prove several results on compact null hypersurfaces like their (non)-existence under various symmetry assumptions on \((M,g)\) (see, e.g., Theorem 4) as well as geometric properties such as when a compact null hypersurface must be totally geodesic (see Theorem 7). In the last section elements of dynamical system theory are used to obtain some implications in causality theory with special attention to the imprisoning property (see Theorems 30, 33 and 35). Recall that the imprisoning property helps one to decide whether or not a certain null hypersurface describes a black hole event horizon in the ambient spacetime.