Real AlphaBeta-Geometries

TL;DR

This paper characterizes four-dimensional neutral manifolds with alpha- and beta-plane distributions, especially focusing on cases where these distributions are parallel, leading to classifications like Walker and two-sided Walker geometries.

Contribution

It provides a local characterization of real alpha-beta geometries with parallel distributions, extending the understanding of Walker geometries and their special cases.

Findings

Characterization of metrics with parallel alpha- or beta-distributions.

Identification of conditions for two-sided Walker geometries.

Analysis of geometries with multiple Weyl principal spinors.

Abstract

By a real alphabeta-geometry we mean a four-dimensional manifold M equipped with a neutral metric h such that (M,h) admits both an integrable distribution of alpha-planes and an integrable distribution of beta-planes. We obtain a local characterization of the metric when at least one of the distributions is parallel (i.e., is a Walker geometry) and the three-dimensional distribution spanned by the alpha- and beta-distributions is integrable. The case when both distributions are parallel, which has been called two-sided Walker geometry, is obtained as a special case. We also consider real \alpha\beta-geometries for which the corresponding spinors are both multiple Weyl principal spinors.