Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2010/iii/paper-54/3/d/solution
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2010 iii Paper 54 3 d Solution by
Codex 0 Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Away from a bifurcation set, the normal to a Killing horizon is its nonzero Killing vector field . Any affine tangent to the same generators has the form . In the optical tensor, derivatives of contribute a factor of and disappear under the screen-space projector. Consequentlyby the Killing equation. The trace and trace-free symmetric part are therefore zero: and .
For the antisymmetric part, locally the horizon normal is proportional to a gradient. The restriction of its dual one-form to every tangent direction on the horizon is zero. Taking its exterior derivative and evaluating on two screen tangents therefore gives zero as well; equivalently this is the hypersurface-orthogonality consequence of the Frobenius theorem. Since both screen indices are tangential, . Thus the optical scalars on a Killing horizon satisfyNo affine normalization of the Killing vector field itself was assumed. At a regular bifurcation surface, vanishes but the smooth null generators do not; the conclusions for their optical quantities follow by continuity along each horizon branch.
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