Cauchy surfaces and diffeomorphism types of globally hyperbolic spacetimes

Abstract

Chernov-Nemirovski observed that the existence of a globally hyperbolic Lorentzian metric on a (3 + 1)-spacetime pins down a smooth structure on the underlying 4-manifold. In this paper, we point out that the diffeomorphism type of a globally hyperbolic (n + 1)-spacetime is determined by the h-cobordism class of its Cauchy surface, hence extending Chernov-Nemirovski's observation to arbitrary dimensions.

to appear Class. Quant. Grav

References in corpus (1)

• Globally hyperbolic spacetimes can be defined as "causal" instead of "strongly causal"

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Globally hyperbolic spacetimes: slicings, boundaries and counterexamples