In the study of Lorentzian manifold spacetimes there exists a hierarchy of causality conditions which are important in proving mathematical theorems about the global structure of such manifolds. These conditions were collected during the late 1970s.[1]

The weaker the causality condition on a spacetime, the more unphysical the spacetime is. Spacetimes with closed timelike curves, for example, present severe interpretational difficulties. See the grandfather paradox.

It is reasonable to believe that any physical spacetime will satisfy the strongest causality condition: global hyperbolicity. For such spacetimes the equations in general relativity can be posed as an initial value problem on a Cauchy surface.

The hierarchy

edit

There is a hierarchy of causality conditions, each one of which is strictly stronger than the previous. This is sometimes called the causal ladder. The conditions, from weakest to strongest, are:

  • Non-totally vicious
  • Chronological
  • Causal
  • Distinguishing
  • Strongly causal
  • Stably causal
  • Causally continuous
  • Causally simple
  • Globally hyperbolic

Given are the definitions of these causality conditions for a Lorentzian manifold  . Where two or more are given they are equivalent.

Notation:

(See causal structure for definitions of  ,   and  ,  .)

Non-totally vicious

edit
  • For some points   we have  .

Chronological

edit
  • There are no closed chronological (timelike) curves.
  • The chronological relation is irreflexive:   for all  .

Causal

edit
  • There are no closed causal (non-spacelike) curves.
  • If both   and   then  

Distinguishing

edit

Past-distinguishing

edit
  • Two points   which share the same chronological past are the same point:
 
  • Equivalently, for any neighborhood   of   there exists a neighborhood   such that no past-directed non-spacelike curve from   intersects   more than once.

Future-distinguishing

edit
  • Two points   which share the same chronological future are the same point:
 
  • Equivalently, for any neighborhood   of   there exists a neighborhood   such that no future-directed non-spacelike curve from   intersects   more than once.

Strongly causal

edit
  • For every neighborhood   of   there exists a neighborhood   through which no timelike curve passes more than once.
  • For every neighborhood   of   there exists a neighborhood   that is causally convex in   (and thus in  ).
  • The Alexandrov topology agrees with the manifold topology.

Stably causal

edit

For each of the weaker causality conditions defined above, there are some manifolds satisfying the condition which can be made to violate it by arbitrarily small perturbations of the metric. A spacetime is stably causal if it cannot be made to contain closed causal curves by any perturbation smaller than some arbitrary finite magnitude. Stephen Hawking showed[2] that this is equivalent to:

  • There exists a global time function on  . This is a scalar field   on   whose gradient   is everywhere timelike and future-directed. This global time function gives us a stable way to distinguish between future and past for each point of the spacetime (and so we have no causal violations).

Globally hyperbolic

edit
  •   is strongly causal and every set   (for points  ) is compact.

Robert Geroch showed[3] that a spacetime is globally hyperbolic if and only if there exists a Cauchy surface for  . This means that:

  •   is topologically equivalent to   for some Cauchy surface   (Here   denotes the real line).

See also

edit

References

edit
  1. ^ E. Minguzzi and M. Sanchez, The causal hierarchy of spacetimes in H. Baum and D. Alekseevsky (eds.), vol. Recent developments in pseudo-Riemannian geometry, ESI Lect. Math. Phys., (Eur. Math. Soc. Publ. House, Zurich, 2008), pp. 299–358, ISBN 978-3-03719-051-7, arXiv:gr-qc/0609119
  2. ^ S.W. Hawking, The existence of cosmic time functions Proc. R. Soc. Lond. (1969), A308, 433
  3. ^ R. Geroch, Domain of Dependence Archived 2013-02-24 at archive.today J. Math. Phys. (1970) 11, 437–449