Fully stratified compact hypersurfaces in Minkowski 4-space (Q685200)

The author studies smoothly immersed, compact, orientable hypersurfaces \(Q\) in four-dimensional Minkowski space. The induced metric on such hypersurfaces must necessarily be signature type changing and there exists a subset \(D^ 0\) at which the induced metric is degenerate. The author shows that there is a natural stratification of \(D^ 0\) provided some locally generic regularity conditions are satisfied. He now assumes that these regularity conditions are satisfied globally and relates global information for \(Q\) to the differential topological structure of the stratification of \(D^ 0\). For instance, he defines a Gauß-map for \(Q\) and expresses its degree in terms of this structure. He also defines curvature functions for (dense subsets of) \(D^ 0\) and bounds the degree of the Gauß-map by an integral over the modulus of these functions. He introduces a natural manifold \(NB\), the ``null-blow-up'', which projects to the union of the Lorentzian part of \(Q\) and \(D^ 0\) such that the preimage of \(D^ 0\) is a circle bundle and the preimage of the Lorentzian part of \(Q\) a pair of circle bundles. He gives inequalities for the Betti numbers of \(NB\) and shows that \(NB\) has trivial Euler class.