Cosmology in (2 + 1) -Dimensions, Cyclic Models, and Deformations of M2,1. (AM-121), Volume 121

The subject matter of this work is an area of Lorentzian geometry which has not been heretofore much investigated: Do there exist Lorentzian manifolds all of whose light-like geodesics are periodic? A surprising fact is that such manifolds exist in abundance in (2 + 1)-dimensions (though in higher dimensions they are quite rare). This book is concerned with the deformation theory of M2, 1 (which furnishes almost all the known examples of these objects). It also has a section describing conformal invariants of these objects, the most interesting being the determinant of a two dimensional "Floquet operator, " invented by Paneitz and Segal.