Born-Infeld determinantal gravity and the taming of the conical singularity in 3-dimensional spacetime

RAFAEL FERRARO AND FRANCO FIORINI

PHYSICS LETTERS B

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Año: 2010

0370-2693

In the context of Born-Infeld emph{determinantal} gravity formulated in a n-dimensional spacetime with absolute parallelism, we found an exact 3-dimensional emph{vacuum} circular symmetric solution without cosmological constant consisting in a rotating spacetime with non singular behavior. The space behaves at infinity as the conical geometry typical of 3-dimensional General Relativity without cosmological constant. However, the solution has no conical singularity because the space ends at a minimal circle that no freely falling particle can ever reach in a finite proper time. The space is curved, but no divergences happen since the curvature invariants vanish at both asymptotic limits. Remarkably, this very mechanism also forbids the existence of closed timelike curves in such a spacetime.