Kerr metric from two commuting complex structures

Abstract The main aim of this paper is to simplify and popularise the construction from the 2013 paper by Apostolov, Calderbank and Gauduchon, which (among other things) derives the Plebański–Demiański family of solutions of GR using ideas of complex geometry. The starting point of this construction is the observation that the Euclidean versions of these metrics should have two different commuting complex structures, as well as two commuting Killing vector fields. After some linear algebra, this leads to an ansatz for the metrics, which is half-way to their complete determination. Kerr metric is a special 2-parameter subfamily in this class, which makes these considerations directly relevant to Kerr as well. This results in a derivation of the Kerr metric that is self-contained and elementary, in the sense of being mostly an exercise in linear algebra.