It is R. Penrose who constructed the twistor theory which gives a correspondence between complex space-times and 3-dimensional complex manifolds called twistor spaces. He and his colleagues investigated conformally invariant equations (e.g. massless field equations, self-dual Yang-Mills equations) on the space-time by transforming them into objects in complex analytical geometry. See e.g. Penrose-Ward [P-W] or Ward-Wells [W-W]. After that, Atiyah-Hitchin-Singer ([A-H-S], cf. [Fr]) constructed

more »

... e twistor spaces corresponding to real 4-dimensional Riemannian manifolds. Their construction as well as that of Penrose is mainly effective under the condition of the self-duality. In this paper we will construct twistor spaces more geometrically from real 4-dimensional Lorentzian manifolds under a suitable curvature condition.