The two identities. Set . The Killing equation says . The Levi-Civita connection has symmetric lower connection indices, so they cancel in the antisymmetric difference:
Use normalized antisymmetrization, so
Put . Contracting with , the second term is and the third is the same after using antisymmetry. Thus
Rearranging proves the Killing derivative contraction identity
Restriction to a Killing horizon. On a Killing horizon, the generator is normal to the horizon as well as tangent to its null generators. Consequently there. One can see this without assuming hypersurface orthogonality away from the horizon: if the horizon is locally , write its dual one-form as near it; then on . By the definition of surface gravity, on the horizon, and lowering that relation gives . The contraction identity becomes
Away from points where vanishes, cancel a nonzero component of ; at a regular bifurcation surface extend by continuity. Therefore
This is surface gravity from the Killing derivative; it concerns the horizon, not every point in the exterior.
Static spherical metric. Choose the Killing vector . Its dual one-form is , and the first identity immediately gives
with all other components zero. Hence
Using the horizon identity and the simultaneous simple zeros,
Here the positive value is chosen for a regular outer Killing horizon with on the exterior side. This is surface gravity of a static spherical horizon. A different normalization rescales surface gravity by ; when an asymptotically flat normalization is wanted, the time coordinate is chosen so at infinity.
Euclidean regularity and temperature. Let , and . On the exterior side, define the proper radial coordinate . After Wick rotation, the near-horizon metric is
The radial-time plane is a polar plane with angular coordinate . Its circumference-to-radius ratio is ; the conical singularity disappears precisely when
This is the Euclidean black-hole regularity condition. If a signed surface gravity convention is used, the period uses .
In a thermal quantum field theory, imaginary-time periodicity is the inverse-temperature condition expressed by the KMS condition. Therefore smoothness identifies the Hawking temperature
in units , or when is measured as an inverse time. It provides the thermal interpretation of surface gravity in black-hole thermodynamics. The regular Euclidean construction describes an equilibrium thermal state; the collapse calculation of Hawking radiation in the last solution supplies the outgoing spectrum. The simple-zero hypothesis excludes an extremal black hole, for which this polar-plane argument changes.