Genericity of nondegeneracy for light rays in stationary spacetimes (Q5962377)

The authors consider a Lorentzian manifold \((M,g)\) with an event \(p\) and an observer \(U\) in \(M\). Then \(p\) and \(U\) are said to be light conjugate whenever there exists a light-like geodesic \(\gamma:[0,1]\to M\) joining \(p\) and \(U\) whose endpoints are conjugate along \(\gamma\). By employing techniques from functional analysis, they demonstrate that if \(p\) and \(U\) are fixed, that the set of stationary Lorentzian metrics on \(M\) for which \(p\) and \(U\) are not light conjugate is generic in a strong sense. This is established by the reduction of a Finsler geodesic problem by using a second order Fermat principle for light rays, and a transversality argument in an infinite-dimensional Banach manifold. Contents include: an Introduction (almost three pages in length); Notation and preliminaries; Light rays and a Randers geodesic; Genericity of light-like nondegeneracy; and References (26 items).