Causal completion of globally hyperbolic conformally flat spacetimes

Abstract

In their paper Geroch, Kronheimer, and Penrose, “Ideal points in space-time,” [Proc. R. Soc. London, Ser. A 327, 545–567 (1972)] introduced a way to attach ideal points to a spacetime M, defining the causal completion of M. They established that this is a topological space which is Hausdorff when M is globally hyperbolic. In this paper, we prove that if, in addition, M is simply-connected and conformally flat, its causal completion is a topological manifold with boundary homeomorphic to S × [0, 1] where S is a Cauchy hypersurface of M. We also introduce three remarkable families of globally hyperbolic conformally flat spacetimes and provide a description of their causal completions.