English

Harmonic morphisms, conformal foliations and shear-free ray congruences

dg-ga 2008-02-03 v1 Differential Geometry

Abstract

Equivalences between conformal foliations on Euclidean 33-space, Hermitian structures on Euclidean 44-space, shear-free ray congruences on Minkowski 44-space, and holomorphic foliations on complex 44-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 44-space define a real-analytic conformal foliation by curves of an open subset of Euclidean 33-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