Spacelike foliations on Lorentz manifolds

Abstract

In this work, we study the geometric properties of spacelike foliations by hypersurfaces on a Lorentz manifold. We investigate conditions for the leaves being stable, totally geodesic or totally umbilical. We consider that ${\bar{M}}^{n+1}$ is equipped with a timelike closed conformal vector field ξ. If the foliation has constant mean curvature, we show that the leaves are stable. When the leaves are compact spacelike hypersurfaces we show that, under certain conditions, its are totally umbilic hypersurfaces. In the case of foliations by complete noncompact hypersurfaces, we using a Maximum Principle at infinity to conclude that the foliation is totally geodesic.