Conformal boundary rigidity from null geodesic travel times

Abstract

The gravitational field of a distant, isolated system is manifested by the conformally invariant Weyl tensor. Thus the conformal structure far from the system encodes the system's gravitational mass. It also encodes the causal structure, thereby linking it to the mass. For asymptotically anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetimes, this link led to a novel positive mass theorem of Page, Surya, and the second author \cite{PSW} which did not rely on any traditional energy condition. Here we ask whether that theorem has a rigidity case. Specifically, we consider all null geodesics in an asymptotically AdS spacetime that depart from the Penrose conformal infinity, travel through spacetime, and return to conformal infinity. If all such geodesics from a given point refocus at an antipodal point at infinity, is the spacetime conformal to anti-de Sitter space? It is easy to answer the question if the asymptotically AdS spacetime either (i) obeys the null energy condition or (ii) is static, and we give simple proofs in those cases. We also answer the question in the case of globally stationary, asymptotically AdS spacetimes, by applying the theory of magnetic geodesics on the Riemannian manifold-with-boundary obtained by quotienting by the stationary Killing vector field. The question has an analogue for asymptotically flat spacetimes, which we also discuss.