Lightlike manifolds and Cartan geometries (Q2050645)

A light-like metric on a manifold \(N\) is a symmetric \((0,2)\)-tensor \(h\), which is positive but not definite, and whose radical \(\mathrm{Rad}(h)=\{ v \in TN \ | \ h(v,w)=0 \ \text{for all} \ w \in TN\}\) is a \(1\)-dimensional distribution of \(N\). Light-like manifolds appear naturally as hypersurfaces of Lorentzian manifolds and have important applications in General Relativity. The existence of the radical distribution prevents from defining a Levi-Civita connection on \(TN\), which is the key difference to the case of pseudo-Riemannian manifolds. In fact, even when the light-like manifold \((N,h)\) is obtained as a hypersurface of a Lorentzian manifold \(M\), there is no canonical splitting of \(TM\) into a component tangential to \(N\) and a normal component. In the paper under review, the author studies light-like manifolds from the point of view of Cartan geometry. The model homogeneous space used is \(\mathcal{N}^{m+1}=\mathrm{PO}(m+1,1)/H\), where \(H\) denotes the group of rigid motions of the \(m\)-dimensional Euclidean space. It turns out that \(\mathcal{N}^{m+1}\) is equivariantly diffeomorphic to the \((m+1)\)-dimensional future lightcone in Lorentz-Minkowski spacetime \(\mathbb{L}^{m+2}=(\mathbb{R}^{m+2}, -dx_{0}^{2}+\sum_{i=1}^{m}dx_{i}^{2})\): \[ \mathcal{N}^{m+1}=\{ v \in \mathbb{L}^{m+2} \ | \ \langle v, v \rangle = 0, \ v_{0}>0 \}. \] This is endowed with a natural \(\mathrm{PO}(m+1,1)\)-invariant light-like metric \(h\) inherited from the ambient space. Assuming that there is a Cartan geometry on an \(m+1\)-dimensional manifold \(N\) of type \((\mathrm{PO}(m+1,1),H)\), the author constructs a unique light-like metric \(h\) on \(N\) and vector field \(Z\) that globally spans the radical distribution of \(h\). He analyzes also the problem whether every light-like manifold \((N,h)\) can be obtained from this construction via Cartan geometry. He obtains a complete solution in the case of totally umbilical light-like manifolds. Finally, the method of realizing a given light-like manifold \((N,h)\) as a hypersurface of a Lorentzian manifold is explained, using again techniques from Cartan geometry.