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