Conformal holonomy of C-spaces, Ricci-flat, and Lorentzian manifolds

Abstract

The main result of this paper is that a Lorentzian manifold is locally conformally equivalent to a manifold with recurrent lightlike vector field and totally isotropic Ricci tensor if and only if its conformal tractor holonomy admits a 2-dimensional totally isotropic invariant subspace. Furthermore, for semi-Riemannian manifolds of arbitrary signature we prove that the conformal holonomy algebra of a C-space is a Berger algebra. For Ricci-flat spaces we show how the conformal holonomy can be obtained by the holonomy of the ambient metric and get results for Riemannian manifolds and plane waves. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.