Null-projectability of Levi-Civita connections

Abstract

We study the natural property of projectability of a torsion-free connection along a foliation on the underlying manifold, which leads to a projected torsion-free connection on a local leaf space, focusing on projectability of Levi-Civita connections of pseudo-Riemannian metric along foliations tangent to null parallel distributions. For the neutral metric signature and mid-dimensional distributions, Afifi showed in 1954 that projectability of the Levi-Civita connection characterizes, locally, the case of Patterson and Walker's Riemann extension metrics. We extend this correspondence to null parallel distributions of any dimension, introducing a suitable generalization of Riemann extensions.