English

Concavity of spacetimes

Differential Geometry 2026-02-25 v2 Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

Motivated by recent breathtaking progress in the synthetic study of Lorentzian geometry, we investigate the local concavity of time separation functions on Finsler spacetimes as a Lorentzian counterpart to Busemann's convexity in metric geometry. We show that a Berwald spacetime is locally concave if and only if its flag curvature is nonnegative in timelike directions. We also give another characterization of nonnegative flag curvature by the convexity of future (or past) capsules, inspired by Krist\'aly--Kozma's result in the positive definite case. These characterizations are new even for Lorentzian manifolds.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.26196,
  title  = {Concavity of spacetimes},
  author = {Tobias Beran and Darius Erös and Shin-ichi Ohta and Felix Rott},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.26196},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

20 pages, 2 figures. Final version

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:07:33.605Z