Unique Carrollian manifolds emerging from Einstein spacetimes
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
2026-02-10 v2
Abstract
We explicitly determine all shear-free null hypersurfaces embedded in an Einstein spacetime, including vacuum asymptotically flat spacetimes. We characterize these hypersurfaces as oriented 3-dimensional manifolds where each is equipped with a coframe basis, a structure group and a connection. Such manifolds are known as null hypersurface structures (NHSs). The coframe and connection one-forms for an NHS appear as solutions to the projection of the Cartan structure equations onto the null hypersurface. We then show that each NHS corresponds to a Carrollian structure equipped with a unique pair of Ehresmann connection and affine connection.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2409.19682,
title = {Unique Carrollian manifolds emerging from Einstein spacetimes},
author = {S. Blitz and D. McNutt and P. Nurowski},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.19682},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
14 pages