Princeton University Gravity Initiative Fall Seminar Series

In this talk, we introduce and solve the characteristic gluing problem for the Einstein vacuum equations. We prove that obstructions to characteristic gluing come from an infinite-dimensional space of conservation laws along null hypersurfaces for the linearized equations at Minkowski. We show that this obstruction space splits into an infinite-dimensional space of gauge-dependent charges and a 10-dimensional space of gauge-invariant charges. We identify the 10 gauge-invariant charges to be related to the energy, linear momentum, angular momentum, and center-of-mass of the spacetime. Based on this identification, we explain how to characteristically glue a given spacetime to a suitably chosen Kerr black hole spacetime. As corollary, we get an alternative proof of the Corvino-Schoen spacelike gluing to Kerr. Moreover, we apply our characteristic gluing method to localize characteristic initial data along null hypersurfaces. In particular, this yields a new proof of the Carlotto-Schoen spacelike localization where our method yields no loss of decay, thus resolving an open problem in this direction. We also outline further applications. This is joint work with S. Aretakis (Toronto) and I. Rodnianski (Princeton).