Asymptotic description of the formation of black holes from short-pulse data

Abstract

In this thesis we present partial progress towards the dynamic formation of black holes in the four-dimensional Einstein vacuum equations from Christodoulou's short-pulse ansatz. We identify natural scaling in a putative solution metric and use the technique of real blowup to propose a desingularized manifold and an associated rescaled tangent bundle (which we call the "short-pulse tangent bundle") on which the putative solution remains regular. We prove the existence of a solution solving the vacuum Einstein equations formally at each boundary face of the blown-up manifold and show that for an open set of restricted short-pulse data, the formal solution exhibits curvature blowup at a hypersurface in one of the boundary hypersurfaces of the desingularized manifold. This thesis is intended to be partially expository. In particular, this thesis presents an exposition of double-null gauges and the solution of the characteristic initial value problem for the Einstein equations, as well as an exposition of a new perspective of Christodoulou's monumental result on the dynamic formation of trapped surfaces.