The causal topology of neutral 4-manifolds with null boundary (Q2662941)

This paper considers certain 4-manifolds with boundary which carry a neutral metric (a pseudo-Riemannian of signature \((2,2)\)) with respect to which the boundary is a null hypersurface. As told in the introduction, the results can be viewed as the first steps in the development of a neutral causal topology for 4-manifolds with boundary. The paper refers to two notions of nullity. These are null sets where every element has zero length and totally null sets where the metric is restricted to zero. There are mainly three constructions in the paper. In the first construction, a neutral \(\mathbb{R}^4\) (denoted as \(\mathbb{R}^{2,2}\)) is embedded onto the interior of a 4-ball conformally such that the boundary of the \(4\)-ball is null. This is called the conformal compactification of \(\mathbb{R}^4\). Certain totally null tori are inherited from the \(\mathbb{R}^{2,2}\) and extended to the null boundary of the 4-balls. Then these tori can be surgered to build neutral spaces with various properties. The second construction deals with subsets of space \(\mathbb{L}(M^3)\) of oriented geodesics in a 3-dimensional space-form \((M^3,g)\), which is known to admit an invariant neutral metric. In particular, when \(M^3\) is \(\mathbb{R}^3\), \(\mathbb{L}(M^3)\) is the tangent space \(TS^2\) of \(S^2\) and it can be obtained by adding a neutral 2-framed 2-handle to the conformal compactification of \(\mathbb{R}^{2,2}\). The framing is determined by a foliation on the associated torus. From the abstract: ``The second constructions are subsets of the 4-dimensional space of oriented geodesics in a 3-dimensional space-form, equipped with its canonical neutral metric. We consider all oriented geodesics tangent to a given embedded strictly convex 2-sphere. Both totally null planes on this null hypersurface are contact, and we characterize the curves in the null boundary that are Legendrian with respect to either totally null plane bundles. The Reeb vector fields associated with the alpha-planes are shown to be the oriented normal lines to geodesics in the surface. The third construction is a neutral geometric model for the intersection of two surfaces in a 4-manifold. The surfaces are the sets of oriented normal lines to two round spheres in Euclidean 3-space, which form Lagrangian surfaces in the 4-dimensional space of all oriented lines. The intersection of the boundaries of their normal neighbourhoods form tori that we prove are totally real and Lorentz if the spheres do not intersect.'' The last section contains a discussion of the preceding constructions with a view to explaining the motivation behind them, to put them in a broader context and to indicate their possible applications to 4-manifold topology.