Harmonic morphisms, conformal foliations and shear-free ray congruences

MaRDI QIDQ1281111zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors Paul Baird, J. C. Wood

Publication date 6 April 1999

Published in Bulletin of the Belgian Mathematical Society - Simon Stevin (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/dg-ga/9603005

zbMATH Keywords

harmonic morphismsminimal surfacesMinkowski spaceconformal foliationsshear-free ray congruence

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Differential geometry of immersions (minimal, prescribed curvature, tight, etc.) (53C42) Differential geometric aspects of harmonic maps (53C43) Variational problems concerning minimal surfaces (problems in two independent variables) (58E12) Spinor and twistor methods in general relativity and gravitational theory; Newman-Penrose formalism (83C60)

Abstract: Equivalences between conformal foliations on Euclidean $3$-space, Hermitian structures on Euclidean $4$-space, shear-free ray congruences on Minkowski $4$-space, and holomorphic foliations on complex $4$-space are explained geometrically and twistorially; these are used to show that 1) any real-analytic complex-valued harmonic morphism without critical points defined on an open subset of Minkowski space is conformally equivalent to the direction vector field of a shear-free ray congruence, 2) the boundary values at infinity of a complex-valued harmonic morphism on hyperbolic $4$-space define a real-analytic conformal foliation by curves of an open subset of Euclidean $3$-space and all such foliations arise this way. This gives an explicit method of finding such foliations; some examples are given.

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Cited in

(5)

• Twistor theory on a finite graph
• Spinor algebra and null solutions of the wave equation
• CR geometry and conformal foliations
• Harmonic morphisms and bicomplex manifolds
• Orthogonal complex structures on domains in R^4

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