Printable PDF
Department of Mathematics,
University of California San Diego

****************************

Math 248 - Analysis Seminar

Georgios Moschidis

Princeton

A proof of the instability of AdS spacetime for the Einstein's null dust system

Abstract:

The AdS instability conjecture is a conjecture about the initial value problem for Einstein vacuum equations with a negative cosmological constant. Proposed by Dafermos and Holzegel in 2006, the conjecture states that generic, arbitrarily small perturbations to the initial data of the AdS spacetime, under evolution by the vacuum Einstein equations with reflecting boundary conditions on conformal infinity, lead to the formation of black holes.Following the work of Bizon and Rostworowski in 2011, a vast amount of numerical and heuristic works have been dedicated to the study of this conjecture, focusing mainly on the simpler setting of the spherically symmetric Einstein-scalar field system. In this talk, we will provide the first rigorous proof of the AdS instability conjecture in the simplest possible setting, namely for the Einstein-null dust system, allowing for both ingoing and outgoing dust. This system is a singular reduction of the spherically symmetric Einstein-massless Vlasov system, in the case when the Vlasov field is supported only on radial geodesics. In order to overcome the 'trivial' break down occurring once the null dust reaches the center $r=0$, we will study the evolution of the system in the exterior of an inner mirror with positive radius $r_0$ and prove the conjecture in this setting. After presenting our proof, we will briefly explain how the main ideas can be extended to more general matter fields, including the regular Einstein-massless Vlasov system.

Jacob Sterbenz

December 5, 2017

8:40 AM

AP&M 7321

****************************