English

Killing-Yano tensors and multi-hermitian structures

Differential Geometry 2011-02-09 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We show that the Euclidean Kerr-NUT-(A)dS metric in 2m2m dimensions locally admits 2m2^m hermitian complex structures. These are derived from the existence of a non-degenerate closed conformal Killing-Yano tensor with distinct eigenvalues. More generally, a conformal Killing-Yano tensor, provided its exterior derivative satisfies a certain condition, algebraically determines 2m2^m almost complex structures that turn out to be integrable as a consequence of the conformal Killing-Yano equations. In the complexification, these lead to 2m2^m maximal isotropic foliations of the manifold and, in Lorentz signature, these lead to two congruences of null geodesics. These are not shear-free, but satisfy a weaker condition that also generalizes the shear-free condition from 4-dimensions to higher-dimensions. In odd dimensions, a conformal Killing-Yano tensor leads to similar integrable distributions in the complexification. We show that the recently discovered 5-dimensional solution of Lu, Mei and Pope also admits such integrable distributions, although this does not quite fit into the story as the obvious associated two-form is not conformal Killing-Yano. We give conditions on the Weyl curvature tensor imposed by the existence of a non-degenerate conformal Killing-Yano tensor; these give an appropriate generalization of the type D condition on a Weyl tensor from four dimensions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0805.3756,
  title  = {Killing-Yano tensors and multi-hermitian structures},
  author = {Lionel Mason and Arman Taghavi-Chabert},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0805.3756},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

28 pages - revised version. Typos and mistakes corrected. Statements of the results improved. Some remarks and references added

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:43:47.957Z