Gravitational instantons admit hyper-K\"ahler structure

TL;DR

This paper proves that gravitational instantons with self-dual curvature inherently possess a hyper-K"ahler structure by explicitly constructing integrable almost complex structures using a spinor formalism.

Contribution

It provides an explicit construction of hyper-K"ahler structures on gravitational instantons using a spinor and Newman-Penrose formalism, extending previous work and clarifying the geometric properties.

Findings

Gravitational instantons with self-dual curvature admit hyper-K"ahler structures.

The paper constructs explicit integrable almost complex structures.

Self-duality of curvature ensures the vanishing of Nijenhuis tensors.

Abstract

We construct the explicit form of three almost complex structures that a Riemannian manifold with self-dual curvature admits and show that their Nijenhuis tensors vanish so that they are integrable. This proves that gravitational instantons with self-dual curvature admit hyper-K\"{a}hler structure. In order to arrive at the three vector valued 1-forms defining almost complex structure, we give a spinor description of real 4-dimensional Riemanian manifolds with Euclidean signature in terms of two independent sets of 2-component spinors. This is a version of the original Newman-Penrose formalism that is appropriate to the discussion of the mathematical, as well as physical properties of gravitational instantons. We shall build on the work of Goldblatt who first developed an NP formalism for gravitational instantons but we shall adopt it to differential forms in the NP basis to make the formalism much more compact. We shall show that the spin coefficients, connection 1-form, curvature 2-form, Ricci and Bianchi identities, as well as the Maxwell equations naturally split up into their self-dual and anti-self-dual parts corresponding to the two independent spin frames. We shall give the complex dyad as well as the spinor formulation of the almost complex structures and show that they reappear under the guise of a triad basis for the Petrov classification of gravitational instantons. Completing the work of Salamon on hyper-K\"ahler structure, we show that the vanishing of the Nijenhuis tensor for all three almost complex structures depends on the choice of a self-dual gauge for the connection which is guaranteed by virtue of the fact that the curvature 2-form is self-dual for gravitational instantons.