Effective connections and fields associated with shear-free null congruences
arXiv:gr-qc/0401120 · doi:10.1023/B:GERG.0000032152.79799.8a
Abstract
A special subclass of shear-free null congruences (SFC) is studied, with tangent vector field being a repeated principal null direction of the Weyl tensor. We demonstrate that this field is parallel with respect to an effective affine connection which contains the Weyl nonmetricity and the skew symmetric torsion. On the other hand, a Maxwell-like field can be directly associated with any special SFC, and the electric charge for bounded singularities of this field turns to be ``self-quantized''. Two invariant differential operators are introduced which can be thought of as spinor analogues of the Beltrami operators and both nullify the principal spinor of any special SFC.
10 pages, talk presented on the Third Ulyanovsk International School-Seminar UISS-2003 "Problems of Theoretical and Observational Cosmology", to appear in Gen. Rel. Grav