arXiv subjects

Gustav Holzegel

Publications and source records attributed to Gustav Holzegel.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Mode stability for the Teukolsky equations on Kerr-anti-de Sitter spacetimes

We prove that there are no non-stationary (with respect to the Hawking vectorfield) real mode solutions to the Teukolsky equations on all $(3+1)$-dimensional subextremal Kerr-anti-de Sitter spacetimes. We further prove that stationary solutions do not exist if the black hole parameters satisfy the Hawking-Reall bound and $\left|a\sqrt{-Λ}\right|<\frac{\sqrt{3}}{20}$. We conclude with the statement of mode stability which preludes boundedness and decay estimates for general solutions which will be proven in a separate paper. Our boundary conditions are the standard ones which follow from fixing the conformal class of the metric at infinity and lead to a coupling of the two Teukolsky equations. The proof relies on combining the Teukolsky-Starobinsky identities with the coupled boundary conditions. In the stationary case the proof exploits elliptic estimates which fail if the Hawking-Reall bound is violated. This is consistent with the superradiant instabilities expected in that regime.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2024

Linear Stability of Schwarzschild-Anti-de Sitter spacetimes III: Quasimodes and sharp decay of gravitational perturbations

In this last part of the series we prove that the slow (inverse logarithmic) decay in time of solutions to the linearised Einstein equations on Schwarzschild-Anti-de Sitter backgrounds obtained in~\cite{Gra.Hol24,Gra.Hol24a} is in fact optimal by constructing quasimode solutions for the Teukolsky system. The main difficulties compared with the case of the scalar wave equation treated in earlier works arise from the first order terms in the Teukolsky equation, the coupling of the Teukolsky quantities at the conformal boundary and ensuring that the relevant quasimode solutions satisfy the Teukolsky-Starobinsky relations. The proof invokes a quasimode construction for the corresponding Regge-Wheeler system (which can be fully decoupled at the expense of a higher order boundary condition) and a reverse Chandrasekhar transformation which generates solutions of the Teukolsky system from solutions of the Regge-Wheeler system. Finally, we provide a general discussion of the well-posedness theory for the higher order boundary conditions that typically appear in the process of decoupling.

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arXiv2024

Quasilinear wave equations on Kerr black holes in the full subextremal range $|a|<M$

We prove global existence, boundedness and decay for small data solutions $ψ$ to a general class of quasilinear wave equations on Kerr black hole backgrounds in the full sub-extremal range $|a|<M$. The method extends our previous [DHRT22], which considered such equations on a wide class of background spacetimes, including Kerr, but restricted in that case to the very slowly rotating regime $|a|\ll M$ (which may be treated simply as a perturbation of Schwarzschild $a=0$). To handle the general $|a|<M$ case, our present proof is based on two ingredients: (i) the linear inhomogeneous estimates on Kerr backgrounds proven in [DRSR16], further refined however in order to gain a derivative in elliptic frequency regimes, and (ii) the existence of appropriate physical space currents satisfying degenerate coercivity properties, but which now must be tailored to a finite number of wave packets defined by suitable frequency projection. The above ingredients can be thought of as adaptations of the two basic ingredients of [DHRT22], exploiting however the peculiarities of the Kerr geometry. The novel frequency decomposition in (ii), inspired by the boundedness arguments of [DR11, DRSR16], is defined using only azimuthal and stationary frequencies, and serves both to separate the superradiant and non-superradiant parts of the solution and to localise trapping to small regions of spacetime. The strengthened (i), on the other hand, allows us to relax the required coercivity properties of our wave-packet dependent currents, so as in particular to accept top order errors provided that they are localised to the elliptic frequency regime. These error terms are analysed with the help of the full Carter separation.

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arXiv2024

Quasilinear wave equations on asymptotically flat spacetimes with applications to Kerr black holes

We prove global existence and decay for small-data solutions to a class of quasilinear wave equations on a wide variety of asymptotically flat spacetime backgrounds, allowing in particular for the presence of horizons, ergoregions and trapped null geodesics, and including as a special case the Schwarzschild and very slowly rotating $\vert a \vert \ll M$ Kerr family of black holes in general relativity. There are two distinguishing aspects of our approach. The first aspect is its dyadically localised nature: The nontrivial part of the analysis is reduced entirely to time-translation invariant $r^p$-weighted estimates, in the spirit of [DR09], to be applied on dyadic time-slabs which for large $r$ are outgoing. Global existence and decay then both immediately follow by elementary iteration on consecutive such time-slabs, without further global bootstrap. The second, and more fundamental, aspect is our direct use of a "blackbox" linear inhomogeneous energy estimate on exactly stationary metrics, together with a novel but elementary physical space top order identity that need not capture the structure of trapping and is robust to perturbation. In the specific example of Kerr black holes, the required linear inhomogeneous estimate can then be quoted directly from the literature [DRSR16], while the additional top order physical space identity can be shown easily in many cases (we include in the Appendix a proof for the Kerr case $\vert a \vert \ll M$, which can in fact be understood in this context simply as a perturbation of Schwarzschild). In particular, the approach circumvents the need either for producing a purely physical space identity capturing trapping or for a careful analysis of the commutation properties of frequency projections with the wave operator of time-dependent metrics.

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arXiv2024

Linear Stability of Schwarzschild-Anti-de Sitter spacetimes I: The system of gravitational perturbations

This is the main paper of a series establishing the linear stability of Schwarzschild-Anti-de Sitter (AdS) black holes to gravitational perturbations. Specifically, we prove that solutions to the linearisation of the Einstein equations $\textrm{Ric}(g) = Λg$ with $Λ<0$ around a Schwarzschild-AdS metric arising from regular initial data and with standard Dirichlet-type boundary conditions imposed at the conformal boundary (inherited from fixing the conformal class of the non-linear metric) remain globally uniformly bounded on the black hole exterior and in fact decay inverse logarithmically in time to a linearised Kerr-AdS metric. The proof exploits a hierarchical structure of the equations of linearised gravity in double null gauge and crucially relies on boundedness and logarithmic decay results for the Teukolsky system, which are independent results proven in Part II of the series. Contrary to the asymptotically flat case, addition of a residual pure gauge solution to the original solution is not required to prove decay of all linearised null curvature and Ricci coefficients. One may however normalise the solution at the conformal boundary to be in standard AdS-form by adding such a pure gauge solution, which is constructed dynamically from the trace of the original solution at the conformal boundary and quantitatively controlled by initial data.

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arXiv2024

Linear Stability of Schwarzschild-Anti-de Sitter spacetimes II: Logarithmic decay of solutions to the Teukolsky system

We prove boundedness and inverse logarithmic decay in time of solutions to the Teukolsky equations on Schwarzschild-Anti-de Sitter backgrounds with standard boundary conditions originating from fixing the conformal class of the non-linear metric on the boundary. The proofs rely on (1) a physical space transformation theory between the Teukolsky equations and the Regge-Wheeler equations on Schwarzschild-Anti de Sitter backgrounds and (2) novel energy and Carleman estimates handling the coupling of the two Teukolsky equations through the boundary conditions thereby generalising earlier work of \cite{Hol.Smu13} for the covariant wave equation. Specifically, we also produce purely physical space Carleman estimates.

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arXiv2024

A note on integrated local energy decay estimates for spherically symmetric black hole spacetimes

We present short proofs of integrated local energy decay estimates on Schwarzschild, extremal Reissner-Nordström, and Schwarzschild-de Sitter spacetimes. The proofs employ novel global physical space multipliers, which, besides their remarkable simplicity, (a) are directly derivable from the geodesic flow, (b) do not require decomposition into spherical harmonics, and (c) whose boundary terms can be controlled by the conserved $T$-energy alone. We also elaborate on the intimate connection between the multipliers of the present paper and the globally good commutators introduced by the first two authors.

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arXiv2023

Uniform Boundedness for Solutions to the Teukolsky Equation on Schwarzschild from Conservation Laws of Linearised Gravity

We consider the equations of linearised gravity on the Schwarzschild spacetime in a double null gauge. Applying suitably commuted versions of the conservation laws derived in earlier work of the second author we establish control on the gauge invariant Teukolsky quantities $α^{[\pm 2]}$ without any reference to the decoupled Teukolsky wave equation satisfied by these quantities. More specifically, we uniformly bound the energy flux of all first derivatives of $α^{[\pm 2]}$ along any outgoing cone from an initial data quantity at the level of first derivatives of the linearised curvature and second derivatives of the linearised connection components. Analogous control on the energy fluxes along any ingoing cone is established a posteriori directly from the Teukolsky equation using the outgoing bounds.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2023

The bulk-boundary correspondence for the Einstein equations in asymptotically Anti-de Sitter spacetimes

In this paper, we consider vacuum asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetimes $( \mathscr{M}, g )$ with conformal boundary $( \mathscr{I}, \mathfrak{g} )$. We establish a correspondence, near $\mathscr{I}$, between such spacetimes and their conformal boundary data on $\mathscr{I}$. More specifically, given a domain $\mathscr{D} \subset \mathscr{I}$, we prove that the coefficients $\mathfrak{g}^{(0)} = \mathfrak{g}$ and $\mathfrak{g}^{(n)}$ (the undetermined term or stress energy tensor) in a Fefferman-Graham expansion of the metric $g$ from the boundary uniquely determine $g$ near $\mathscr{D}$, provided $\mathscr{D}$ satisfies a generalised null convexity condition (GNCC). The GNCC is a conformally invariant criterion on $\mathscr{D}$, first identified by Chatzikaleas and the second author, that ensures a foliation of pseudoconvex hypersurfaces in $\mathscr{M}$ near $\mathscr{D}$, and with the pseudoconvexity degenerating in the limit at $\mathscr{D}$. As a corollary of this result, we deduce that conformal symmetries of $( \mathfrak{g}^{(0)}, \mathfrak{g}^{(n)} )$ on domains $\mathscr{D} \subset \mathscr{I}$ satisfying the GNCC extend to spacetimes symmetries near $\mathscr{D}$. The proof, which does not require any analyticity assumptions, relies on three key ingredients: (1) a calculus of vertical tensor-fields developed for this setting; (2) a novel system of transport and wave equations for differences of metric and curvature quantities; and (3) recently established Carleman estimates for tensorial wave equations near the conformal boundary.

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arXiv2023

The wave equation on subextremal Kerr spacetimes with small non-decaying first order terms

We consider the perturbed covariant wave equation $\Box_{g_{M,a}} Ψ= \varepsilon \mathbf{B} Ψ$ on the exterior of a fixed subextremal Kerr spacetime $\left(\mathcal{M},g_{M,a}\right)$. Here $\mathbf{B}$ is a suitably regular first order differential operator respecting the symmetries of Kerr whose coefficients are assumed to decay in space but not in time. We establish integrated decay estimates for solutions of the associated Cauchy problem. The proof adapts the framework introduced by Dafermos--Rodnianski--Shlapentokh-Rothman \cite{DRSR} in the $\varepsilon=0$ case. We combine their estimates with a new global pseudodifferential commutator estimate, which generalises our previous work in the Schwarzschild case. The construction of the commutator exploits the central observation of \cite{DRSR} that superradiant frequencies are not trapped. A further major technical ingredient of the proof consists in establishing appropriate convolution estimates for expressions arising from the interplay of the $\mathbf{B}$-term and the time cutoffs in the microlocal framework.

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arXiv2021

The non-linear stability of the Schwarzschild family of black holes

We prove the non-linear asymptotic stability of the Schwarzschild family as solutions to the Einstein vacuum equations in the exterior of the black hole region: general vacuum initial data, with no symmetry assumed, sufficiently close to Schwarzschild data evolve to a vacuum spacetime which (i) possesses a complete future null infinity $\mathcal{I}^+$ (whose past $J^-(\mathcal{I}^+)$ is moreover bounded by a regular future complete event horizon $\mathcal{H}^+$), (ii) remains close to Schwarzschild in its exterior, and (iii) asymptotes back to a member of the Schwarzschild family as an appropriate notion of time goes to infinity, provided that the data are themselves constrained to lie on a teleologically constructed codimension-$3$ "submanifold" of moduli space. This is the full nonlinear asymptotic stability of Schwarzschild since solutions not arising from data lying on this submanifold should by dimensional considerations approach a Kerr spacetime with rotation parameter $a\neq 0$, i.e. such solutions cannot satisfy (iii). The proof employs teleologically normalised double null gauges, is expressed entirely in physical space and makes essential use of the analysis in our previous study of the linear stability of the Kerr family around Schwarzschild [DHR], as well as techniques developed over the years to control the non-linearities of the Einstein equations. The present work, however, is entirely self-contained. In view of the recent [DHR19, TdCSR20] our approach can be applied to the full non-linear asymptotic stability of the subextremal Kerr family.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2020

A note on the wave equation on black hole spacetimes with small non-decaying first order terms

We present an elementary physical space argument to establish local integrated decay estimates for the perturbed wave equation $\Box_g ϕ= εβ^a \partial_a ϕ$ on the exterior of the Schwarzschild geometry $(\mathcal{M},g)$. Here $β$ is a regular vectorfield on $\mathcal{M}$ decaying suitably in space but not necessarily in time. The proof is formulated to cover also perturbations of the Regge--Wheeler equation.

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arXiv2019

Asymptotic properties of linear field equations in anti-de Sitter space

We study the global dynamics of the wave equation, Maxwell's equation and the linearized Bianchi equations on a fixed anti-de Sitter (AdS) background. Provided dissipative boundary conditions are imposed on the dynamical fields we prove uniform boundedness of the natural energy as well as both degenerate (near the AdS boundary) and non-degenerate integrated decay estimates. Remarkably, the non-degenerate estimates "lose a derivative". We relate this loss to a trapping phenomenon near the AdS boundary, which itself originates from the properties of (approximately) gliding rays near the boundary. Using the Gaussian beam approximation we prove that non-degenerate energy decay without loss of derivatives does not hold. As a consequence of the non-degenerate integrated decay estimates, we also obtain pointwise-in-time decay estimates for the energy. Our paper provides the key estimates for a proof of the non-linear stability of the anti-de Sitter spacetime under dissipative boundary conditions. Finally, we contrast our results with the case of reflecting boundary conditions.

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arXiv2017

Unique continuation from infinity in asympotically Anti-de Sitter spacetimes II: Non-static boundaries

We generalize our unique continuation results recently established for a class of linear and nonlinear wave equations $\Box_g ϕ+ σϕ= \mathcal{G} ( ϕ, \partial ϕ)$ on asymptotically anti-de Sitter (aAdS) spacetimes to aAdS spacetimes admitting non-static boundary metrics. The new Carleman estimates established in this setting constitute an essential ingredient in proving unique continuation results for the full nonlinear Einstein equations, which will be addressed in forthcoming papers. Key to the proof is a new geometrically adapted construction of foliations of pseudoconvex hypersurfaces near the conformal boundary.

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arXiv2017

Boundedness and decay for the Teukolsky equation on Kerr spacetimes I: the case $|a|\ll M$

We prove boundedness and polynomial decay statements for solutions of the spin $\pm2$ Teukolsky equation on a Kerr exterior background with parameters satisfying $|a|\ll M$. The bounds are obtained by introducing generalisations of the higher order quantities $P$ and $\underline{P}$ used in our previous work on the linear stability of Schwarzschild. The existence of these quantities in the Schwarzschild case is related to the transformation theory of Chandrasekhar. In a followup paper, we shall extend this result to the general sub-extremal range of parameters $|a|<M$. As in the Schwarzschild case, these bounds provide the first step in proving the full linear stability of the Kerr metric to gravitational perturbations.

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arXiv2016

Stable shock formation for nearly simple outgoing plane symmetric waves

In an influential 1964 article, P. Lax studied $2 \times 2$ genuinely nonlinear strictly hyperbolic PDE systems (in one spatial dimension). Using the method of Riemann invariants, he showed that a large set of smooth initial data lead to bounded solutions whose first spatial derivatives blow up in finite time, a phenomenon known as wave breaking. In the present article, we study the Cauchy problem for two classes of quasilinear wave equations in two spatial dimensions that are closely related to the systems studied by Lax. When the data have one-dimensional symmetry, Lax's methods can be applied to the wave equations to show that a large set of smooth initial data lead to wave breaking. Here we study solutions with initial data that are close, as measured by an appropriate Sobolev norm, to data belonging to a distinguished subset of Lax's data: the data corresponding to simple plane waves. Our main result is that under suitable relative smallness assumptions, the Lax-type wave breaking for simple plane waves is stable. The key point is that we allow the data perturbations to break the symmetry. Moreover, we give a detailed, constructive description of the asymptotic behavior of the solution all the way up to the first singularity, which is a shock driven by the intersection of null (characteristic) hyperplanes. We also outline how to extend our results to the compressible irrotational Euler equations. To derive our results, we use Christodoulou's framework for studying shock formation to treat a new solution regime in which wave dispersion is not present.

math.AP↗

arXiv2016

Unique continuation from infinity in asymptotically Anti-de Sitter spacetimes

We consider the unique continuation properties of asymptotically Anti-de Sitter spacetimes by studying Klein-Gordon-type equations $\Box_g ϕ+ σϕ= \mathcal{G} ( ϕ, \partial ϕ)$, $σ\in \mathbb{R}$, on a large class of such spacetimes. Our main result establishes that if $ϕ$ vanishes to sufficiently high order (depending on $σ$) on a sufficiently long time interval along the conformal boundary $\mathcal{I}$, then the solution necessarily vanishes in a neighborhood of $\mathcal{I}$. In particular, in the $σ$-range where Dirichlet and Neumann conditions are possible on $\mathcal{I}$ for the forward problem, we prove uniqueness if both these conditions are imposed. The length of the time interval can be related to the refocusing time of null geodesics on these backgrounds and is expected to be sharp. Some global applications as well a uniqueness result for gravitational perturbations are also discussed. The proof is based on novel Carleman estimates established in this setting.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2016

Conservation laws and flux bounds for gravitational perturbations of the Schwarzschild metric

We derive an energy conservation law for the system of gravitational perturbations on the Schwarzschild spacetime expressed in a double null gauge. The resulting identity involves only first derivatives of the metric perturbation. Exploiting the gauge invariance up to boundary terms of the fluxes that appear, we are able to establish positivity of the flux on any outgoing null hypersurface to the future of the initial data. This allows us to bound the total energy flux through any such hypersurface, including the event horizon, in terms of initial data. We similarly bound the total energy radiated to null infinity. Our estimates provide a direct approach to a weak form of stability, thereby complementing the proof of the full linear stability of the Schwarzschild solution recently obtained in [M. Dafermos, G. Holzegel and I. Rodnianski \emph{The linear stability of the Schwarzschild solution to gravitational perturbations}, arXiv:1601.06467].

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