No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we prove that lightlike geodesics of a pseudo-Finsler manifold and its focal points are preserved up to reparametrization by anisotropic conformal changes, using the Chern connection and the anisotropic calculus and the fact that geodesics are critical points of the energy functional and Jacobi fields, the kernel of its index form. This result has applications to the study of Finsler spacetimes.
Some well-known Lorentzian concepts are transferred into the more general setting of cone structures, which provide both the causality of the spacetime and the notion of cone geodesics without making use of any metric. Lightlike hypersurfaces are defined within this framework, showing that they admit a unique folitation by cone geodesics. This property becomes crucial after proving that, in globally hyperbolic spacetimes, achronal boundaries are lightlike hypersurfaces under some restrictions, allowing one to easily obtain some time-minimization properties of cone geodesics among causal curves departing from a hypersurface of the spacetime.
We study the integrability of the conformal geodesic flow (also known as the conformal circle flow) on the $SO(3)$--invariant gravitational instantons. On a hyper--Kahler four--manifold the conformal geodesic equations reduce to geodesic equations of a charged particle moving in a constant self--dual magnetic field. In the case of the anti--self--dual Taub NUT instanton we integrate these equations completely by separating the Hamilton--Jacobi equations, and finding a commuting set of first integrals. This gives the first example of an integrable conformal geodesic flow on a four--manifold which is not a symmetric space. In the case of the Eguchi--Hanson we find all conformal geodesics which lie on the three--dimensional orbits of the isometry group. In the non--hyper--Kahler case of the Fubini--Study metric on $CP^2$ we use the first integrals arising from the conformal Killing--Yano tensors to recover the known complete integrability of conformal geodesics.
Conformal geodesics are solutions to a system of third order of equations, which makes a Lagrangian formulation problematic. We show how enlarging the class of allowed variations leads to a variational formulation for this system with a third--order conformally invariant Lagrangian. We also discuss the conformally invariant system of fourth order ODEs arising from this Lagrangian, and show that some of its integral curves are spirals.
Lorentzian manifolds with parallel spinors are important objects of study in several branches of geometry, analysis and mathematical physics. Their Cauchy problem has recently been discussed by Baum, Leistner and Lischewski, who proved that the problem locally has a unique solution up to diffeomorphisms, provided that the intial data given on a space-like hypersurface satisfy some constraint equations. In this article we provide a method to solve these constraint equations. In particular, any curve (resp. closed curve) in the moduli space of Riemannian metrics on $M$ with a parallel spinor gives rise to a solution of the constraint equations on $Mtimes (a,b)$ (resp. $Mtimes S^1$).
The aim of the present paper is to provide a global presentation of the theory of special Finsler manifolds. We introduce and investigate globally (or intrinsically, free from local coordinates) many of the most important and most commonly used speci