A pseudo-Riemannian manifold is said to be timelike (spacelike) Osserman if the Jordan form of the Jacobi operator Kx is independent of the particular unit timelike (spacelike) tangent vector X. The first main result is that timelike (spacelike) Osserman manifold (M, g) of signature (2, 2) with the diagonalizable Jacobi operator is either locally rank-one symmetric or flat. In the nondiagonalizable case the characteristic polynomial of Kx has to have a triple zero, which is the other main result. An important step in the proof is based on Walker's study of pseudo-Riemannian manifolds admitting parallel totally isotropic distributions. Also some interesting additional geometric properties of Osserman type manifolds are established. For the nondiagonalizable Jacobi operators some of the examples show a nature of the Osserman condition for Riemannian manifolds different from that of pseudo-Riemannian manifolds.
Let p be a point of a Lorentzian manifold M. We show that if M is spacelike Osserman at p, then M has constant sectional curvature at p ; similarly, if M is timelike Osserman at p, then M has constant sectional curvature at p. The reverse implications are immediate. The timelike case and 4-dimensional spacelike case were first studied in [3] ; we use a different approach to this case.
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