2023/04/17 by Christoph Kehle, Kehle, Christoph, Ryan Unger +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #83 #Analysis of PDEs (math.AP) #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Differential Geometry (math.DG) #FOS: Mathematics #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2304.08455
openalex publication_date 2023/04/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this paper, we initiate the study of characteristic event horizon gluing in vacuum. More precisely, we prove that Minkowski space can be glued along a null hypersurface to any round symmetry sphere in a Schwarzschild black hole spacetime as a C2 solution of the Einstein vacuum equations. The method of proof is fundamentally nonperturbative and is closely related to our previous work in spherical symmetry [KU22] and Christodoulou's short pulse method [Chr09]. We also make essential use of the perturbative characteristic gluing results of Aretakis-Czimek-Rodnianski [ACR21a; CR22]. As an immediate corollary of our methods, we obtain characteristic gluing of Minkowski space to the event horizon of very slowly rotating Kerr with prescribed mass M and specific angular momentum a. Using our characteristic gluing results, we construct examples of vacuum gravitational collapse to very slowly rotating Kerr black holes in finite advanced time with prescribed M and 0≤ |a|≪ M. Our construction also yields the first example of a spacelike singularity arising from one-ended, asymptotically flat gravitational collapse in vacuum.