Are there analogs of the Nash Embedding Theorems for Pseudo-Riemannian Manifolds?
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1$\begingroup$ Yes, and the proof much easier, one can explicitly can write a formula for the embedding into $\mathbb{R}^{N,N}$ $\endgroup$– Anton PetruninCommented Apr 17, 2013 at 0:12
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$\begingroup$ @AntonPetrunin: Why not give a reference? Others might stumble upon this question through a web search and find your reference useful. $\endgroup$– Alex M.Commented Feb 14, 2016 at 17:28
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$\begingroup$ @AlexM. There is an explicit construction is called Nash twist. For the given metric $g$ it produce one parameter family of embeddings $f_t$ in $\mathbb{R}^N$ with induced metric $g+t{\cdot}h$ for some fixed metric $h$. The embedding $x\mapsto (2{\cdot}f_t(x), f_{2\cdot t}(x))$ in $\mathbb{R}^{N,N}$ is isometric. I learned it from Gromov's book on partial differential relations. $\endgroup$– Anton PetruninCommented Feb 15, 2016 at 12:37
2 Answers
See here:
MR0262980 Reviewed Greene, Robert E. Isometric embeddings of Riemannian and pseudo-Riemannian manifolds. Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society, No. 97 American Mathematical Society, Providence, R.I. 1970 iii+63 pp. (Reviewer: W. F. Pohl)
Not clear where you are headed with your concise question, but if you have any interest in Lorenzian manifolds as instances of pseudo-Riemannian manifolds, then this might be of interest, especially for the theorem of Campbell:
"The embedding of General Relativity in five dimensions." Carlos Romero, Reza Tavakol, Roustam Zalaletdinov. General Relativity and Gravitation. March 1996, Volume 28, Issue 3, pp 365-376. (Springer link.)
Abstract. We argue that General Relativistic solutions can always be locally embedded in Ricci-flat 5-dimensional spaces. This is a direct consequence of a theorem of Campbell (given here for both a timelike and spacelike extra dimension, together with a special case of this theorem) which guarantees that any $n$-dimensional Riemannian manifold can be locally embedded in an $(n+1)$-dimensional Ricci-flat Riemannian manifold. [...]
And there are many papers in some sense following, e.g.: "The embedding of space–times in five dimensions with nondegenerate Ricci tensor," F. Dahia and C. Romero, J. Math. Phys. 43, 3097 (2002). (AIP link.)
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1$\begingroup$ I see the "locally embedded" part, but surely an $S^{3}XS^{1}$ spacetime topology needs an embedding into $\mathbb{R}^{4,2}$ to yield a global vector basis (in order to describe the parallelization thereof) $\endgroup$ Commented Feb 6, 2021 at 1:56