Curvature measures of pseudo-Riemannian manifolds

Abstract: The Weyl principle is extended from the Riemannian to the pseudo-Riemannian setting, and subsequently to manifolds equipped with generic symmetric

(0, 2)

-tensors. More precisely, we construct a family of generalized curvature measures attached to such manifolds, extending the Riemannian Lipschitz-Killing curvature measures introduced by Federer. We then show that they behave naturally under isometric immersions, in particular they do not depend on the ambient signature. Consequently, we extend Theorema Egregium to surfaces equipped with a generic metric of changing signature, and more generally, establish the existence as distributions of intrinsically defined Lipschitz-Killing curvatures for such manifolds of arbitrary dimension. This includes in particular the scalar curvature and the Chern-Gauss-Bonnet integrand. Finally, we deduce a Chern-Gauss-Bonnet theorem for pseudo-Riemannian manifolds with generic boundary.

Review text

In this technical article the authors generalize the Weyl principle and some of its consequences from compact Riemannian manifolds to pseudo-Riemmanian manifolds and even more, to manifolds with changing-signature-metrics (subject to some regularity conditions). Let \((M,g)\) be a compact Riemannian manifold isometrically embedded into the Euclidean space \(\mathbb{R}^n\). Recall the classical result of Weyl from 1939 that the Euclidean volume of a tube of Euclidean radius \(r>0\) surrounding \(M\) within the ambient space is a polynomial function of \(r\) for small \(r\). The \textit{Weyl principle} says that the coefficients of this polynomial are expressible in terms of the intrinsic geoemtry of \((M,g)\) alone (hence it is a sort of \textit{Theorema Egregium} \textit{à la} Gauß), therefore they are called the \textit{intrinsic volumes of \((M,g)\)}. In fact these coefficients are obtained as integrals of certain curvature expressions, called the \textit{Lipschitz-Killing curvatures}, of \((M,g)\). Now let \(M,g)\) be a pseudo-Riemannian manifold; or more generally, a space with a signature-changing lightcone-regular metric, an \textit{LC-regular space} for short, which means that \(M\) is equipped with a smooth \((0,2)\)-type symmetric tensor field \(g\) such that the induced symmetric bilinear form \(g_x:T_xM\times T_x\rightarrow\mathbb{R}\) has the following properties: (i) its signature might depend on \(x\) and (ii) the zero is its regular value. Assume that \((M,g)\) is isometrically embedded into the ambient flat space \(\mathbb{R}^{p,q}\). The authors' main results can be roughly summarized as follows: in an appropriately reformulated distributional form the Weyl principle continues to hold for pseudo-Riemannian manifolds (Theorem D) as well as for LC-regular spaces (Theorem E). These imply a particular Theorema Egregium for LC-regular surfaces embedded in \(\mathbb{R}^{2,2}\) (Theorem A); and more generally the existence of the corresponding intrinsic curvature expressions, i.e., the Lipschitz-Killing curvatures (Theorem B); and finally the validity of the Chern-Gauß-Bonnet theorem (Theorem C).

Recommendations

Cites work

Cited in

(21)

This page was built for publication: Curvature measures of pseudo-Riemannian manifolds

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q2151192)