Timelike conjugate points in Lorentzian length spaces

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Main Authors: Grant, James D. E., Kunzinger, Michael, Ohanyan, Argam, Schinnerl, Yasmin, Steinbauer, Roland
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Grant, James D. E.
Kunzinger, Michael
Ohanyan, Argam
Schinnerl, Yasmin
Steinbauer, Roland
author_facet Grant, James D. E.
Kunzinger, Michael
Ohanyan, Argam
Schinnerl, Yasmin
Steinbauer, Roland
contents We study notions of conjugate points along timelike geodesics in the synthetic setting of Lorentzian (pre-)length spaces, inspired by earlier work for metric spaces by Shankar--Sormani. After preliminary considerations on convergence of timelike and causal geodesics, we introduce and compare one-sided, symmetric, unreachable and ultimate conjugate points along timelike geodesics. We show that all such notions are compatible with the usual one in the smooth (strongly causal) spacetime setting. As applications, we prove a timelike Rauch comparison theorem, as well as a result closely related to the recently established Lorentzian Cartan--Hadamard theorem by Erös--Gieger. In the appendix, we give a detailed treatment of the Fréchet distance on the space of non-stopping curves up to reparametrization, a technical tool used throughout the paper.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_12855
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Timelike conjugate points in Lorentzian length spaces
Grant, James D. E.
Kunzinger, Michael
Ohanyan, Argam
Schinnerl, Yasmin
Steinbauer, Roland
Differential Geometry
Metric Geometry
53B30, 53C22, 53C23
We study notions of conjugate points along timelike geodesics in the synthetic setting of Lorentzian (pre-)length spaces, inspired by earlier work for metric spaces by Shankar--Sormani. After preliminary considerations on convergence of timelike and causal geodesics, we introduce and compare one-sided, symmetric, unreachable and ultimate conjugate points along timelike geodesics. We show that all such notions are compatible with the usual one in the smooth (strongly causal) spacetime setting. As applications, we prove a timelike Rauch comparison theorem, as well as a result closely related to the recently established Lorentzian Cartan--Hadamard theorem by Erös--Gieger. In the appendix, we give a detailed treatment of the Fréchet distance on the space of non-stopping curves up to reparametrization, a technical tool used throughout the paper.
title Timelike conjugate points in Lorentzian length spaces
topic Differential Geometry
Metric Geometry
53B30, 53C22, 53C23
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12855