A four-vector is said to be lightlike if its four-vector norm satisfies .
One should note that the four-vector norm is nothing more than a special case of the more general Lorentzian inner product on Lorentzian -space with metric signature : In this more general environment, the inner product of two vectors and has the form
whereby one defines a vector to be lightlike precisely when .
Lightlike vectors are sometimes called null vectors. The collection of all lightlike vectors in a Lorentzian space (e.g., in the Minkowski space of special relativity) is known as the light cone. One often draws distinction between lightlike vectors which are positive and those which are negative.