Years later, the different strands came together. The shear-free condition was found to be closely related
to the good-cut equation; namely, that one equation could be transformed into the other. The major
surprise came when we discovered that the regular solutions of either equation were generated by complex
world lines in an auxiliary Minkowski space [26]. (These complex world lines could be thought of
as being complex analytic curves in the associated -space. The deeper meaning of this
remains a question still to be resolved; it is this issue which is partially addressed in the present
work.)
The complex world line mentioned above, associated with the spinning, charged and uncharged particle metrics, now can be seen as just a special case of these regular solutions. Since these metrics were algebraically special, among the many possible asymptotically shear-free NGCs there was (at least) one totally shear-free (rather than asymptotically shear-free) congruence. This was the one we first discovered in 1965, that became the complex center-of-mass world line (which coincided with the complex center of charge in the charged case.). This observation was the clue for how to search for the generalization of the special world line associated with algebraically-special metrics and thus, in general, how to look for the special world line (and congruence) to be identified with the complex center of mass.
For the algebraically-special metrics, the null tetrad system at with one leg being the tangent null
vector to the shear-free congruence leads to the vanishing of the asymptotic Weyl tensor component, i.e.,
. For the general case, no tetrad exists with that property but one can always find a null
tetrad with one leg being tangent to the shear-free congruence so that the
harmonics of
vanish. It is precisely that choice of tetrad that led to our definition of the complex center of
mass.
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