No Arabic abstract
The definition of quasi-local mass for a bounded space-like region in space-time is essential in several major unsettled problems in general relativity. The quasi-local mass is expected to be a type of flux integral on the boundary two-surface and should be independent of whichever space-like region it bounds. An important idea which is related to the Hamiltonian formulation of general relativity is to consider a reference surface in a flat ambient space with the same first fundamental form and derive the quasi-local mass from the difference of the extrinsic geometries. This approach has been taken by Brown-York and Liu-Yau (see also related works) to define such notions using the isometric embedding theorem into the Euclidean three-space. However, there exist surfaces in the Minkowski space whose quasilocal mass is strictly positive. It appears that the momentum information needs to be accounted for to reconcile the difference. In order to fully capture this information, we use isometric embeddings into the Minkowski space as references. In this article, we first prove an existence and uniqueness theorem for such isometric embeddings. We then solve the boundary value problem for Jangs equation as a procedure to recognize such a surface in the Minkowski space. In doing so, we discover new expression of quasi-local mass. The new mass is positive when the ambient space-time satisfies the dominant energy condition and vanishes on surfaces in the Minkowski space. It also has the nice asymptotic behavior at spatial and null infinity. Some of these results were announced in [29].
We prove a rigidity theorem that shows that, under many circumstances, quasi-isometric embeddings of equal rank, higher rank symmetric spaces are close to isometric embeddings. We also produce some surprising examples of quasi-isometric embeddings of higher rank symmetric spaces. In particular, we produce embeddings of $SL(n,mathbb R)$ into $Sp(2(n-1),mathbb R)$ when no isometric embeddings exist. A key ingredient in our proofs of rigidity results is a direct generalization of the Mostow-Morse Lemma in higher rank. Typically this lemma is replaced by the quasi-flat theorem which says that maximal quasi-flat is within bounded distance of a finite union of flats. We improve this by showing that the quasi-flat is in fact flat off of a subset of codimension $2$.
We study the nonlinear stability of the $(3+1)$-dimensional Minkowski spacetime as a solution of the Einstein vacuum equation. Similarly to our previous work on the stability of cosmological black holes, we construct the solution of the nonlinear initial value problem using an iteration scheme in which we solve a linearized equation globally at each step; we use a generalized harmonic gauge and implement constraint damping to fix the geometry of null infinity. The linear analysis is largely based on energy and vector field methods originating in work by Klainerman. The weak null condition of Lindblad and Rodnianski arises naturally as a nilpotent coupling of certain metric components in a linear model operator at null infinity. Upon compactifying $mathbb{R}^4$ to a manifold with corners, with boundary hypersurfaces corresponding to spacelike, null, and timelike infinity, we show, using the framework of Melroses b-analysis, that polyhomogeneous initial data produce a polyhomogeneous spacetime metric. Finally, we relate the Bondi mass to a logarithmic term in the expansion of the metric at null infinity and prove the Bondi mass loss formula.
We construct isometric and conformally isometric embeddings of some gravitational instantons in $mathbb{R}^8$ and $mathbb{R}^7$. In particular we show that the embedding class of the Einstein--Maxwell instanton due to Burns is equal to $3$. For $mathbb{CP}^2$, Eguchi--Hanson and anti-self-dual Taub-NUT we obtain upper and lower bounds on the embedding class.
We prove that if $phi colon mathbb{R}^2 to mathbb{R}^{1+2}$ is a smooth proper timelike immersion with vanishing mean curvature, then necessarily $phi$ is an embedding, and every compact subset of $phi(mathbb{R}^2)$ is a smooth graph. It follows that if one evolves any smooth self-intersecting spacelike curve (or any planar spacelike curve whose unit tangent vector spans a closed semi-circle) so as to trace a timelike surface of vanishing mean curvature in $mathbb{R}^{1+2}$, then the evolving surface will either fail to remain timelike, or it will fail to remain smooth. We show that, even allowing for null points, such a Cauchy evolution must undergo a scalar curvature blow-up---where the blow-up is with respect to an $L^1L^infty$ norm---and thus the evolving surface will be $C^2$ inextendible beyond singular time. In addition we study the continuity of the unit tangent for the evolution of a self-intersecting curve in isothermal gauge, which defines a well-known evolution beyond singular time.
This article uses Cartan-Kahler theory to construct local conservation laws from covariantly closed vector valued differential forms, objects that can be given, for example, by harmonic maps between two Riemannian manifolds. We apply the articles main result to construct conservation laws for covariant divergence free energy-momentum tensors. We also generalize the local isometric embedding of surfaces in the analytic case by applying the main result to vector bundles of rank two over any surface.