Complex surfaces and null conformal Killing vector fields (Q6040534)

The authors study the relationship between the existence of null conformal Killing vector fields and the existence of compatible complex and para-hypercomplex structures on a pseudo-Riemannian manifold with metric of signature (2,2). They first give a topological classification of compact neutral Hermitian surfaces with a nowhere vanishing null vector field. They then show that a pair of orthogonal, pointwise linearly independent, null, conformal Killing vector fields defines a para-hyperhermitian structure and use this fact to classify smooth compact 4-manifolds admitting such a pair of vector fields.