Minimal surfaces and particles in 3-manifolds (Q2385553)

The main subject of this article are anti-de Sitter (AdS) \(3\)-manifolds which are complete Lorentzian manifolds which are isometric to the anti-de Sitter three-space. Moreover, it is assumed that such a manifold is GHMC (globally hyperbolic maximal compact). This condition implies that such a manifold is homeomorphic to the product of a closed Riemann surface \(\Sigma\) and the real line \(\mathbb R\). In particular, it is shown that the moduli space of such manifolds which are homeomorphic to \(\Sigma \times\mathbb R\) is homeomorphic to the cotangent bundle to the Teichmüller space \(T_g\) where \(g\) is the genus of \(\Sigma\). The correspondence \(M \to (c,h) \in T^\ast T_g\) is established by assigning to a manifold \(M\) a maximal embedded space-like surface \(S\) in \(M\) where \(c\) is the conformal class of \(S\) and \(h\) the quadratic Hopf differential of \(S\). This result is extended to the case of AdS \(3\)-manifolds with conical singularities at time-like lines with given angles \(\theta_i \in (0,\pi), i=1,\dots,n\), at conical points. Therefore, we have to consider only manifolds which contain maximal surfaces and replace the moduli space of manifolds by the moduli space \(H_{g,n,\{\theta\}}\) of maximal surfaces in them. It is proved that \(H_{g,n,\{\theta\}}\) is naturally homeomorphic to \(T_{g,n}\). The authors also give another proof to the Mess parameterization of the moduli space of GHMS AdS \(3\)-manifolds of genus \(g\) by two copies of \(T_g\), prove the analog of this result for the cone manifold case. They also sketch the extensions of these results with appropriate modifications to Minkowski and de Sitter manifolds. At the end, the authors propose the Hamiltonian formulation of gravity in AdS setting based on the foliation of an GHMC AdS manifold \(M\) by space-like surfaces equidistant to the maximal surface in \(M\).