Lorentzian Gromov-Hausdorff convergence and pre-compactness

Abstract: The goal of the paper is to introduce a convergence `a la Gromov-Hausdorff for Lorentzian spaces, building on $\epsilon$-nets consisting of causal diamonds and relying only on the time separation function. This yields a geometric notion of convergence, which can be applied to synthetic Lorentzian spaces (Lorentzian pre-length spaces) or smooth spacetimes. Among the main results, we prove a Lorentzian counterpart of the celebrated Gromov's pre-compactness theorem for metric spaces, where controlled covers by balls are replaced by controlled covers by diamonds. This yields a geometric pre-compactness result for classes of globally hyperbolic spacetimes, satisfying a uniform doubling property on Cauchy hypersurfaces and a suitable control on the causality. The final part of the paper establishes several applications: we show that Chru\'sciel-Grant approximations are an instance of the Lorentzian Gromov-Hausdorff convergence here introduced, we prove that timelike sectional curvature bounds are stable under such a convergence, we introduce timelike blow-up tangents and discuss connections with the main conjecture of causal set theory.