Rigidity in vacuum under conformal symmetry

Abstract

Moitvated in part by [3], in this note we obtain a rigidity result for globally hyperbolic vacuum spacetimes in arbitrary dimension that admit a timelike conformal Killing vector field. Specifically, we show that if M is a Ricci flat, timelike geodesically complete spacetime with compact Cauchy surfaces that admits a timelike conformal Killing field X, then M must split as a metric product, and X must be Killing. This gives a partial proof of the Bartnik splitting conjecture in the vacuum setting.