The subject matter of this work is an area of Lorentzian geometry which has not been heretofore much investigated: Do there exist Lorentzian manifolds all of whose light-like geodesics are periodic? A surprising fact is that such manifolds exist in abundance in (2 + 1)-dimensions (though in higher dimensions they are quite rare). This book is concerned with the deformation theory of M2,1 (which furnishes almost all the known examples of these objects). It also has a section describing conformal invariants of these objects, the most interesting being the determinant of a two dimensional "Floquet operator," invented by Paneitz and Segal.
- ISBN10 0691085145
- ISBN13 9780691085142
- Publish Date 21 March 1989
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Princeton University Press
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 240
- Language English
- URL https://press.princeton.edu/isbn/9780691085142