Witten spinors on maximal, conformally flat hypersurfaces

TL;DR

This paper investigates boundary conditions for the Witten equation on flat and maximal hypersurfaces, characterizing solutions that ensure non-vanishing spinor fields and exploring their relation to topology and boundary data.

Contribution

It determines conformally invariant boundary conditions for the Witten equation and provides explicit solutions on flat and Reissner–Nordström data sets.

Findings

Boundary conditions that exclude zeros of Witten solutions are characterized.

Explicit solutions are constructed on flat and Reissner–Nordström hypersurfaces.

The existence of non-vanishing solutions depends on topology and boundary data.

Abstract

The boundary conditions that exclude zeros of the solutions of the Witten equation (and hence guarantee the existence of a 3-frame satisfying the so-called special orthonormal frame gauge conditions) are investigated. We determine the general form of the conformally invariant boundary conditions for the Witten equation, and find the boundary conditions that characterize the constant and the conformally constant spinor fields among the solutions of the Witten equations on compact domains in extrinsically and intrinsically flat, and on maximal, intrinsically globally conformally flat spacelike hypersurfaces, respectively. We also provide a number of exact solutions of the Witten equation with various boundary conditions (both at infinity and on inner or outer boundaries) that single out nowhere vanishing spinor fields on the flat, non-extreme Reissner--Nordstr\"om and Brill--Lindquist data sets. Our examples show that there is an interplay between the boundary conditions, the global topology of the hypersurface and the existence/non-existence of zeros of the solutions of the Witten equation.