LAUSR

We establish a new lower bound for the null injectivity radius of a null cone. The idea is to use a function closely related to the null second fundamental form which codifies the directional expansion of the null cone along any null geodesic in it. This approach uses first derivatives of the metric instead of curvature bounds. The technique is applied to a family of null cones with the null conjugate radius less or equal to the null crossing radius, or folded due to the curvature in a precise way that we call geometric fold. This condition is necessary because there are trivial examples with bounded null injectivity radius due to global identifications. We show two examples where we compute the real null injectivity radius and the lower bound provided in this paper, in order to compare both quantities. We also give an analogous result for Riemannian manifolds.