1. Introduction
The study on the local and global geometric properties of curves has attracted the attention of many researchers. In case of semi-Euclidean space, there are three categories of curves: spacelike curves, timelike curves, and null (lightlike) curves. The spacelike curves and timelike curves are called non-degenerated curves, which have many similar properties with the curves in Euclidean space [
1,
2]. However, for the null curves (degenerate curves), with the reason of no length, compared with non-degenerate curves, there are many different geometrical properties. Seeing that, from the differential geometry point of view, the null curves have their own research value. Many researchers had focused their attention on the null curves [
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10]. The first author and Pei, D.H., obtained the singularities and other characterizations of null curves on the 3-null cone in [
4,
6]. The authors focused their attention on the characterizations of the pseudo-spherical null curves and Bertrand null curves in [
8].
On the other hand, Bertrand stated the fact that the principal normal vector of a curve can also be the principal normal vector of another curve in Euclidean 3-space [
11], and he gave a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of the Bertrand mate. From then on, many researchers began to study the Bertrand curves and got many interesting properties [
12,
13,
14]. The authors gave the relationship between the curvatures and the torsions of the Bertrand curve pairs in [
12]. However, due to the increase of dimension, the authors gave the new definitions of the Bertrand curves in 4-space [
15,
16,
17]. The definitions of the new Bertrand curves ((1,3)-type) and some characterizations were obtained in [
15]. The characterizations of the general surfaces and generalized Bertrand curves in Galilean space were studied in [
17,
18].
Synthesizing the above views, in this paper, we study the existence conditions of the Bertrand curves of the null curves in semi-Euclidean 4-space. Firstly, we provide some fundamental concepts on the null curves and the semi-Euclidean 4-space. Then, we present some geometrical properties of the Bertrand curves of the null curves in
Section 3, and we provide the existence conditions of the Bertrand curves for two different cases. In the last section, two examples are given to demonstrate the correctness of the conclusions in view of the geometric intuition.
2. Preliminaries
Let be a 4-dimensional vector space. For any vectors and in the pseudo scalar product of and is defined by . is called semi-Euclidean 4-space and denoted by
A vector
in
is called a
spacelike vector, a
lightlike vector or a
timelike vector if
is positive, zero or negative, respectively. The
norm of a vector
is defined by
For any two vectors
and
in
we say that
is
pseudo-perpendicular to
if
The pseudo vector product of vectors
,
, and
is defined by
where
is the canonical basis of
. One can easily show that
. For a real number
we define the hyperplane with pseudo normal vector
by
We call
a
spacelike hyperplane, a
timelike hyperplane or a
lightlike hyperplane if
is a spacelike, timelike or null (lightlike) vector, respectively.
Definition 1. Let be a curve in . Then is called a null (lightlike) curve, a spacelike curve or a timelike curve if its tangent vector is null vector, spacelike vector or timelike vector for , respectively.
In this paper, we consider the null curve with pseudo parameter s satisfying and
For a non-null curve
in
, we have a non-null bundle subspace of
satisfying
However, for a null curve
, the tangent bundle
can be split into three non-intersecting complementary vector bundles. For this purpose, we consider a complementary vector bundle (screen vector bundle)
to
in
, which means
We know
is non-degenerate. Since
is para compact, there exists a screen bundle, such that
Notice that since
is of rank 2 and contains
, there exists a unique null vector bundle of rank 1, which plays a similar roll like the unique normal vector bundle of the non-null curve. Hence, the unique transversal vector
is obtained by the following lemma [
3]:
Lemma 1. Let be a null curve in , be a sub bundle of a screen vector bundle , such that , where stands for the null transverse of vector . Let be a locally defined nowhere zero section.
- 1.
Then everywhere in
- 2.
If we consider given by then is a unique vector bundle over of rank 1, and, there is a unique vector field satisfying - 3.
The tangent bundle splits into the following three bundle spaces:
For a null curve in , and the unique null transversal vector field to , the screen vector bundle is Lorentz. Hence, the two null vectors and are two Frenet frames of . Then, and we construct a non null frame , and
A null curve
with the Frenet frame
, satisfies
where
is the tangent vector,
is the normal vector,
is the first binormal vector, and
is the second binormal vector. The Frenet Equations of
are given as follows [
3],
where
,
and
are called the first curvature function, the second curvature function and the third curvature function of
, respectively.
As in [
15,
17], we give the definition of the Bertrand curve as following,
Definition 2. Let and be two curves in semi-Euclidean 4-space and a regular -map, such that each point of corresponds to the point of for all If the Frenet–Serret normal plane spanned by at each point of coincides with the Frenet–Serret normal plane spanned by at each corresponding point of , then is called the Bertrand curve (mate) of .
3. The Bertrand Curves of Null Curves
In this section, we present some geometrical characterizations and provide the existence conditions of the Bertrand curves of the null curves in semi-Euclidean 4-space. We also give the existence of the Bertrand curves for two cases () respectively.
For
be a null curve in semi-Euclidean 4-space, the Bertrand curve
of
can be written as following,
where
and
are
functions on
I,
, and
is the pseudo parameter of
.
Differentiating the Equation (4) with respect to
we can obtain
Since the plane spanned by
and
is parallel with the plane spanned by
and
, we have
where
are two
functions. By the fact
we get
Together with the Equations (9) and (10), when
, we obtain
From
together with the Equations (3) and (7), we can obtain
and
Theorem 1. Let be a null curve in semi-Euclidean 4-space with the frames , and the Bertrand curve of with the frames , where . When , there exist three functions as in the formulas (4), (6) and (7) such that:
Case 1: when , the following conclusions are established:
- 1.
and , where are constants;
- 2.
- 3.
, where
Case 2: when , the following conclusions are established:
- 1.
, where K is a constant;
- 2.
- 3.
Proof. When
, by the Equations (10) and (15), we can obtain
Case 1: when
,
where
is a constant, from the third equation of (15), we have
By differentiating the Equation (16), we obtain
and we get
and
. Substituting
to the first equation of (15) gives us
where
are two constants.
By the Equations (5)–(7), (11) and (16), we can obtain
By differentiating the vector
, we get
By
, we find
From,
, we have
and we obtain
By substituting (21) in (19) and (20), we have
,
Hence,
where
Case 2: When , and , we can obtain and where K is a constant.
By substituting the above to Equation (9),
we find
By differentiating
, we get
hence, we obtain
By the fact
,
, and
, we can obtain
- (1).
When from (23), we know , which contradicts with . Hence, we omit this case.
- (2).
When
we know
and
, where
is a constant. By substituting this in the Equation (23), we have
By the fact that
we can obtain
□
Theorem 2. Let be a null curve in semi-Euclidean 4-space with the frames , and the Bertrand curve of with the frames , where . When , there exist three functions as in the formulas (4), (6) and (7) such that:
- 1.
is a constant, and ;
- 2.
- 3.
Proof. By the Equation (15), we can obtain
By differentiating
, we get
By the fact
,
, and
, we can obtain
Since
we have
By substituting Equations (30), (31) and (33) into Equation (11), we obtain that there exist two functions
and
satisfying
By substituting the Equations (29), (31) and (33) into Equation (34), we can obtain
When we choose , then . □