Gravitational instantons of type \(D_{k}\) (Q814904)

A self-dual gravitational instanton is a hyper-Kähler manifold of real dimension four. Self-dual gravitational instantons appeared in the late 1970's in the formulation of Euclidean quantum gravity where they play a role similar to that of self-dual Yang-Mills solutions in quantum gauge theories. Self-dual gravitational instantons can be distinguished from each other by their topology and by the asymptotic behaviour of their metric. In this paper, the authors obtain explicit formulas for asymptotically flat hyper-Kähler metrics of type \(D_k\). The formulas are obtained by two different apporaches. The first approach is based on work that initially followed the twistor approach of the \(A_k\) case, and the second approach uses the generalized Legendre transform construction of Lindström, Ivanov and Roček.