On the space of initial values strictly satisfying the dominant energy condition

Abstract

The dominant energy condition imposes a restriction on initial value pairs found on a spacelike hypersurface of a Lorentzian manifold. In this article, we study the space of initial values that satisfy this condition strictly. To this aim, we introduce an index difference for initial value pairs and compare it to its classical counterpart for Riemannian metrics. Recent non-triviality results for the latter will then imply that this space has non-trivial homotopy groups.