Harmonic morphisms, conformal foliations and shear-free ray congruences
Abstract
Equivalences between conformal foliations on Euclidean -space, Hermitian structures on Euclidean -space, shear-free ray congruences on Minkowski -space, and holomorphic foliations on complex -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 -space define a real-analytic conformal foliation by curves of an open subset of Euclidean -space and all such foliations arise this way. This gives an explicit method of finding such foliations; some examples are given.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.dg-ga/9603005,
title = {Harmonic morphisms, conformal foliations and shear-free ray congruences},
author = {P. Baird and J. C. Wood},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:dg-ga/9603005},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
30 pages, Latex 2.09, one figure