Chronoprojective Cartan structures on four-dimensional manifolds (Q794293)

In this paper a new geometry, the so-called chronoprojective geometry, is constructed over four dimensional manifolds. First the Lie groups involved in the construction are described, namely the chronoprojective group denoted \(O^ 2(3)\), a subgroup of GL(5,\({\mathbb{R}})\) which leaves invariant a particular degenerate quadratic form, and its subgroups \(L^ 0\) and \(L^ 1: L^ 0\) is generated by the elements which admit t(00001) as eigenvector and \(L^ 1\) is the linear isotropy subgroup of \(O^ 2(3)/L^ 0\). The homogeneous space \(O^ 2(3)/L^ 0\) can be written as \((R^ 3\otimes S^ 1)| {\mathbb{Z}}^ 2\) and so appears as a generalized Möbius space, the so-called chronoprojective space-time. Then a chronoprojective connection is defined as a Cartan connection in a principal bundle \(P(V_ 4,L^ 0)\) with respect to the chronoprojective group. As P can be realized as a subbundle of \(P^ 2(V_ 4)\) the fibre bundle of second order frames on \(V_ 4\), the notions of chronoprojective Cartan structure on \(V_ 4\), admissible linear connections and chronoprojective equivalence can be introduced. The chronoprojective Weyl curvature tensor is constructed explicitly and it is shown that the chronoprojective flatness is equivalent to the vanishing of the chronoprojective Weyl curvature tensor. In the last part of the paper all the above established results are explicitly applied to a Galilean manifold \((V_ 4,\psi,\gamma)\) (\(\psi\) being a differential one-form of class one and \(\gamma\) a positive semi-definite symmetric contravariant tensor field of degree two such that ker \(\gamma\) is generated by \(\psi)\).