Conformal reference frames for Lorentzian manifolds (Q2404878)

The author introduces the concept of a conformal reference frame of a Lorentzian \(4\)-manifold. The conformal reference frame description offers a good starting point to obtain and study twistor spaces for general curved spacetimes in spite of the well-known non-integrability issues caused by the curvature in the traditional approach. Let \((X,g)\) be a time-oriented Lorentzian \(4\)-manifold. Its \textit{sky} \({\mathfrak S}_x\) \textit{at} \(x\in X\) is the projectivization of the future-directed null cone of \(T_xX\). Consequently \({\mathfrak S}_x\) can be identified with the complex projective line, hence inherits a complex structure and the collection of all skies forms a smooth projective-line-bundle \({\mathfrak S}X\) over \(X\) called its \textit{sky}. Then roughly speaking (for a precise definition cf. Definition 8) a \textit{conformal reference frame} of \((X,g)\) is a map from (an open subset of) \({\mathfrak S}X\) into a \(3\)-manifold \(M\) mapping forward null geodesics (regarded by their null tangent vector fields as sections of \({\mathfrak S}X\)) into points of \(M\). In this way the target space \(M\) inherits a natural contact structure from the set \(N(X)\) of forward null geodesics of \((X,g)\) hence the geometry of this latter set is encoded into the contact geometry of \(M\). The case of the Minkowski spacetime is worked out as an example (see Section 3) and some structure theorems are also proved (see Theorems 1 and 2 in Section 4).