English

Linking, Legendrian linking and causality

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2012-07-15 v1 Differential Geometry Geometric Topology Symplectic Geometry

Abstract

The set N of all null geodesics of a globally hyperbolic (d+1)-dimensional spacetime (M,g) is naturally a smooth (2d-1)-dimensional contact manifold. The sky of an event is the subset of N defined by all null geodesics through that event, and is an embedded Legendrian submanifold of N diffeomorphic to a (d-1)-dimensional sphere. It was conjectured by Low that for d=2 two events are causally related iff their skies are linked (in an appropriate sense). We use the contact structure and knot polynomial calculations to prove this conjecture in certain particular cases, and suggest that for d=3 smooth linking should be replaced with Legendrian linking.

Cite

@article{arxiv.gr-qc/0210036,
  title  = {Linking, Legendrian linking and causality},
  author = {Jose Natario and Paul Tod},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:gr-qc/0210036},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

30 pages, 14 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:gr-qc/0108061