paper

Accelerated observers and the notion of singular spacetime

arXiv:1710.08712 · doi:10.1088/1361-6382/aaa849

Abstract

Geodesic completeness is typically regarded as a basic criterion to determine whether a given spacetime is regular or singular. However, the principle of general covariance does not privilege any family of observers over the others and, therefore, observers with arbitrary motions should be able to provide a complete physical description of the world. This suggests that in a regular spacetime, all physically acceptable observers should have complete paths. In this work we explore this idea by studying the motion of accelerated observers in spherically symmetric spacetimes and illustrate it by considering two geodesically complete black hole spacetimes recently described in the literature. We show that for bound and locally unbound accelerations, the paths of accelerated test particles are complete, providing further support to the regularity of such spacetimes.

11 pages, 1 figure, revtex4-1 style; appendix added; significant changes in section III; minor changes in sections I and IV; appendix added; Accepted for publication on Class. Quant. Grav

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