Injectivity radius of Lorentzian manifolds (Q956629)

In this interesting paper the authors study the geometry and regularity of Lorentzian manifolds under natural curvature and volume bounds and they establish several injectivity radius estimates at either a point or its past lightcone. The authors' proofs are based on a generalization of arguments from Riemannian geometry. They first establish estimates on the reference Riemannian metric, and then they present an extension of these classical techniques and results to Lorentzian manifolds. Recall that when the Lorentz manifold \((M, g)\) is seen as a result of the Einstein evolution equations, it seems natural to fix a time-like vector field \(T\), consider the Riemannian metric \(g_T\) naturally associated to \(g\) and \(T\), and define the injectivity radius \(Inj_g(M, p, T)\), at the point \(p\), as the greatest \(r>0\) such that the exponential map \(exp_p\) is a diffeomorphism from the geodesic ball \(B_T(0,r) \subset T_pM\) onto the geodesic ball \({\mathcal B}_T(p,r):=exp_p(B(0, r))\). Let us then consider an arbitrary geodesic \(\gamma=\gamma(s)\) initiating at \(p\) and let us \(g\)-parallel transport the vector \(T\) along this geodesic, defining therefore a vector field \(T_{\gamma}\) along this geodesic. At every point of \(\gamma\) we can introduce a reference inner product \(g_{T_{\gamma}}\) and compute the curvature norm \(|R_g|_{T_{\gamma}}\). With this construction the authors express the main result as follows: Theorem 1.1.(Injectivity radius of Lorentzian manifolds). Let \((M^{n+1},g)\) be a time-orientable Lorentzian \((n+1)\)-manifold. Let \((p,T)\) be an observer consisting of a point \(p \in M\) and a future-oriented time-like unit vector \(T \in T_pM\). Assume that the exponential map \(exp_p\) is defined in a ball \(B_T(0,r) \subset T_pM\) and the Riemann curvature satisfies \(\sup_{\gamma}|R_g|_{T_{\gamma}} \leq \frac{1}{r^2}\), where the supremum is over the domain of definition of \(\gamma\) and over every \(g\)-geodesic \(\gamma\) initiating from a vector in the Riemannian ball \(B_T(0,r) \subset T_pM\). Then there exists a constant \(c(n)\), depending only on the dimension of the manifold, such that \[ \frac{Inj_g(M,p,T)}{r} \geq c(n) \frac{Vol_g({\mathcal B}_T(p, c(n)r))}{r^{n+1}}. \]