Metric lines in Lorentz--Minkowski geometry (Q2490644)

Let \(X\) be a real inner product space of dimension at least 2 and let \(\ell\) be the associated Lorentz-Minkowski distance. For any non-empty set \(S\) and any map \(\delta : S \times S \to \mathbb R\), the pair \( (S,\delta)\) is called a real distance space. A subset \(k \subset S\) is called a metric line of \((S,\delta)\) if there is a bijection \( \varphi : k \to \mathbb R\) such that \(\delta(x,y) =| \varphi(x) - \varphi(y)|\) for any \(x,y \in k\). The author proves that any metric line of \((X,d)\), where \(d(x,y) = \sqrt{|\ell(x,y)|}\), is the image \(f(\mathbb R)\) of some map \(f : {\mathbb R} \to X\), where the map \(f\) turns out to be one of six types, each of which is described explicitly.