Matching van Stockum dust to Papapetrou vacuum

Abstract

Addressing a long-standing problem, we show that every van Stockum dust can be matched to a 1-parametric family of non-static Papapetrou vacuum metrics, and the converse. The boundary, if existing, is determined by the vanishing of certain first-order invariant on the vacuum side. Moreover, we establish a relation to Ehlers and Kramer–Neugebauer transformations, which allows us to look for dust clouds with a prescribed boundary. Explicit examples include the Bonnor metric and a new vacuum exterior to the Lanczos–van Stockum dust metric, as well as dust clouds with nontrivial topology.