Concircularity on GRW-space-times and conformally flat spaces

Abstract

There are two smooth functions [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] associated to a nontrivial concircular vector field [Formula: see text] on a connected Riemannian manifold [Formula: see text], called potential function and connecting function. In this paper, we show that presence of a timelike nontrivial concircular vector field influences the geometry of generalized Robertson–Walker space-times. We use a timelike concircular vector field [Formula: see text] on an [Formula: see text] -dimensional connected conformally flat Lorentzian manifold, [Formula: see text], to find a characterization of generalized Robertson–Walker space-time with fibers Einstein manifolds. It is interesting to note that for [Formula: see text] the concircular vector field annihilates energy-momentum tensor and also that in this case the potential function [Formula: see text] is harmonic. In the second part of this paper, we show that presence of a nontrivial concircular vector field [Formula: see text] with connecting function [Formula: see text] on a complete and connected [Formula: see text] -dimensional conformally flat Riemannian manifold [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], with Ricci curvature [Formula: see text] non-negative, satisfying [Formula: see text], is necessary and sufficient for [Formula: see text] to be isometric to either a sphere [Formula: see text] or to the Euclidean space [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] is the scalar curvature.