Twisting non-shearing congruences of null geodesics, almost CR structures and Einstein metrics in even dimensions (Q2118034)

This paper is devoted to the study of the geometry of twisting non-shearing congruence of null geodesics on a conformal manifold of even dimension greater than four and Lorentzian signature. The author gives a necessary and sufficient condition on the Weyl tensor for the twist to induce an almost Robinson structure, i.e., such that the screen bundle of the congruence is equipped with a bundle complex structure. In this case the leaf space of the congruence locally acquires a partially integrable contact almost CR structure of positive definite signature. Further curvature conditions for the integrability of the almost Robinson structure and the almost CR structure and for the flatness of the latter are given. It is shown that under certain natural assumption on the Weyl tensor, any metric in the conformal class that is a solution to the Einstein field equations determines an almost CR-Einstein structure on the leaf space of the congruence. These metrics depend on three paramenters and include the Feffermann-Einstein metric and Taub-NUT-(A)dS metric in the integrable case. In the non-integrable case, new solutions to the Einstein field equations are obtained. These can be constructed from strictly almost Kähler-Einstein manifolds.