Completeness of compact Lorentzian manifolds with abelian holonomy (Q261453)

An important class of Lorentzian manifolds are those with special holonomy, i.e., for which the connected holonomy group acts indecomposably. The authors study the problem of finding conditions under which a compact Lorentzian manifold with special holonomy is geodesically complete. In particular they consider the case of Lorentzian manifolds with abelian holonomy. It is known that a compact Lorentzian manifold is geodesically complete if it is homogeneous or has constant curvature or admits a time-like conformal vector field. In the paper the authors consider Lorentzian manifolds with abelian holonomy, which are locally modelled by pp-waves and which in general do not satisfy any of the previous three conditions. They prove that compact pp-waves are universally covered by a vector space and they get the metric on the universal cover. In this way they show that every compact pp-wave is geodesically complete and that every Ricci-flat compact pp-wave is a plane wave.