Space time manifolds and contact structures

Abstract

A new class of contact manifolds (carring a global non-vanishing timelike vector field) is introduced to establish a relation between spacetime manifolds and contact structures. We show that odd dimensional strongly causal (in particular, globally hyperbolic) spacetimes can carry a regular contact structure. As examples, we present a causal spacetime with a non regular contact structure and a physical model [Gödel Universe] of Homogeneous contact manifold. Finally, we construct a model of 4-dimensional spacetime of general relativity as a contact CR-submanifold.