Concavity of spacetimes
Motivated by recent breathtaking progress in the synthetic study of Lorentzian geometry, we investigate the local concavity of time separation functions on Finsler spacetimes as a Lorentzian counterpart to Busemann’s convexity in metric geometry. We show that a Berwald spacetime is locally concave if and only if its flag curvature is nonnegative in timelike directions. We also give another characterization of nonnegative flag curvature by the convexity of future (or past) capsules, inspired by Kristály–Kozma’s result in the positive definite case. These characterizations are new even for Lorentzian manifolds.
Authors
- Felix Rott (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7314-0889)
- Shin‐ichi Ohta (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9967-6737)
- Tobias Beran
- Darius Erös
Institutions
- University of Vienna (AT)
- Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (IT)
- RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (JP)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Section A Mathematics
- Published
- 2026-02-18
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1017/prm.2026.10133
- Primary Topic
- Cosmology and Gravitation Theories
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- European Commission
- Austrian Science Fund
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science