Paul Tod
I review the twistor theory construction of stationary and axisymmetric, Lorentzian signature solutions of the Einstein vacuum equations and the related toric Ricci-flat metrics of Riemannian signature, \cite{W,MW,F,FW}. The construction…
Wojciech Kami\'nski has provided a non real-analytic counterexample to our claim in [1] that conformal geodesics cannot spiral. This erratum illustrates how the proof of Lemma 4.6 [1] (on which our claim was based) fails.
We show that conformal geodesics on a Riemannian manifold cannot spiral: there does not exist a conformal geodesic which becomes trapped in every neighbourhood of a point.
We study massless solutions to the Einstein equations coupled to different matter models with a magnetic field and a conformal gauge singularity assuming spatial homogeneity with three commuting spatial translations. We show that there are…
We consider four-dimensional, Riemannian metrics for which one or other of the self-dual or anti-self-dual Weyl tensors is type-D and which satisfy the Einstein-Maxwell equations with the corresponding Maxwell field aligned with the type-D…
Toric Ricci--flat metrics in dimension four correspond to certain holomorphic vector bundles over a twistor space. We construct these bundles explicitly, by exhibiting and characterising their patching matrices, for the five--parameter…
We consider the Einstein-Boltzmann system for massless particles in the Bianchi I space-time with scattering cross-sections in a certain range of soft potentials. We assume that the space-time has an initial conformal gauge singularity and…
We show that massless solutions to the Einstein-Vlasov system in a Bianchi I space-time with small anisotropy, i.e. small shear and small trace-free part of the spatial energy momentum tensor, tend to a radiation fluid in an Einstein-de…
When he first introduced the notion of a conformal boundary into the study of asymptotically empty space-times, Penrose noted that that the boundary would be null, space-like or time-like according as the cosmological constant $\Lambda$ was…
We construct isometric and conformally isometric embeddings of some gravitational instantons in $\mathbb{R}^8$ and $\mathbb{R}^7$. In particular we show that the embedding class of the Einstein--Maxwell instanton due to Burns is equal to…
This article is an extended version of a talk given in Oxford in June 2021 as part of an online meeting `Ninety minutes of CCC' to mark the 90th birthday of Sir Roger Penrose. I assemble some questions that I have been asked or have asked…
We use the isometric embedding of the spatial horizon of fast rotating Kerr black hole in a hyperbolic space to compute the quasi-local mass of the horizon for any value of the spin parameter $j=J/m^2$. The mass is monotonically decreasing…
As a footnote to arXiv:1909.07756, I show that, given a (time-like) umbilic 3-surface $\Sigma$ in a 4-dimensional space-time $M$, the Penrose limit taken along any null geodesic $\Gamma$ which lies in $\Sigma$ is a diagonalisable…
We consider four-dimensional, Riemannian, Ricci-flat metrics for which one or other of the self-dual or anti-self-dual Weyl tensors is type-D. Such metrics always have a valence-2 Killing spinor, and therefore a Hermitian structure and at…
We study the integrability of the conformal geodesic flow (also known as the conformal circle flow) on the $SO(3)$--invariant gravitational instantons. On a hyper--K\"ahler four--manifold the conformal geodesic equations reduce to geodesic…
In these lectures my aim is to review enough of conformal differential geometry in four dimensions to give an account of Penrose's conformal cyclic geometry.
We consider the problem of finding all space-time metrics for which all plane-wave Penrose limits are diagonalisable plane waves. This requirement leads to a conformally invariant differential condition on the Weyl spinor which we analyse…
We obtain finite-time existence for the massless Boltzmann equation, with a range of soft cross-sections, in an FLRW background with data given at the initial singularity. In the case of positive cosmological constant we obtain long-time…
We describe the range of the Radon transform on the space $M$ of irreducible conics in $\CP^2$ in terms of natural differential operators associated to the $SO(3)$-structure on $M=SL(3, \R)/SO(3)$ and its complexification. Following…
We find necessary and sufficient conditions for existence of a locally isometric embedding of a vacuum space-time into a conformally-flat 5-space. We explicitly construct such embeddings for any spherically symmetric Lorentzian metric in…