Surface gravity of compact non-degenerate horizons under the dominant energy condition (Q2676452)

The strong cosmic censorship conjecture, roughly speaking, states that under reasonable physical assumptions a spacetime has to be globally hyperbolic. This means that, under reasonable physical assumptions, no complete spacelike hypersurface \(S\) should have a non-empty Cauchy horizon \(H^+(S)\). One could start exploring the case of compact Cauchy horizons. If one such horizon is found one could expect the spacetime to be rather special, namely that the horizon is Killing (i.e. there is a Killing field tangent to the horizon). This is the Isenberg-Moncrief conjecture. The work provides a proof of the following related result: Theorem. Under the dominant energy condition any non-degenerate smooth compact totally geodesic horizon admits a smooth tangent vector field of constant non-zero surface gravity. More precisely, this work studies the following object (\(\star\)) \(H\) is an embedded compact connected smooth totally geodesic null hypersurface. In a previous paper the second author proved that these objects are natural as under the null convergence condition any compactly generated horizon (a priori being just Lipschitz) is of this type. Now, every future-directed lightlike vector field \(n\) tangent to \(H\) satisfies an equation of the following form \[ \nabla_X n =\omega(X) n \] where \(X\in TH\) and \(\omega: H \to T^*H\) is a 1-form. The {\em surface gravity} is the quantity \(\kappa=\omega(n)\). The paper proves that \(n\) can be chosen in such a way that \(\kappa\) is a negative constant (it can be normalized to \(-1\)) provided the dominant energy condition holds and the horizon is {\em non-degenerate} in the sense that it admits a future incomplete generator. The Killing horizons have constant surface gravity, so this proof is indeed an important step in the proof of the Isenberg-Moncrief conjecture. Moreover, physically, the surface gravity is connected with the temperature of the horizon, so the result has an important physical meaning as it states that horizons have constant temperature. Finally, the authors prove other related result, for instance: Theorem. Assume that \((M,g)\) satisfies the dominant energy condition. Every non-degenerate horizon \(H\) is actually a Cauchy horizon bounded on one side by a region of chronology violation.