Total curvature and length estimates for timelike curves in Lorentzian length spaces

Abstract

We introduce and study a synthetic notion of timelike total curvature for curves in Lorentzian length spaces with upper curvature bounds. In particular, we prove that our notion agrees with its smooth counterpart, and we show that timelike curves of finite total curvature are rectifiable. As the main application, we provide a sharp lower bound for the length of timelike curves solely in terms of the time separation between their endpoints and their total curvature.