Oliver Petersen

• PhD
• Researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Hawking’s local rigidity theorem, proven in the smooth setting by Alexakis-Ionescu-Klainerman, says that the event horizon of any stationary non-extremal black hole is a non-degenerate Killing horizon. In this paper, we prove that the full asymptotic expansion of any smooth vacuum metric at a non-degenerate Killing horizon is determined by the geom...

In a recent paper, we proved that solutions to linear wave equations in a subextremal Kerr-de Sitter spacetime have asymptotic expansions in quasinormal modes up to a decay order given by the normally hyperbolic trapping, extending the results of Vasy (2013). One central ingredient in the argument was a new definition of quasinormal modes, where a...

We prove that solutions to linear wave equations in a subextremal Kerr–de Sitter spacetime have asymptotic expansions in quasinormal modes up to a decay order given by the normally hyperbolic trapping, extending the result of the second named author (2013). The main novelties are a different way of obtaining a Fredholm setup that defines the quasin...

We prove that quasinormal modes (or resonant states) for linear wave equations in the subextremal Kerr and Kerr–de Sitter spacetimes are real analytic. The main novelty of this paper is the observation that the bicharacteristic flow associated to the linear wave equations for quasinormal modes with respect to a suitable Killing vector field has a s...

We prove that any smooth vacuum spacetime containing a compact Cauchy horizon with surface gravity that can be normalised to a nonzero constant admits a Killing vector field. This proves a conjecture by Moncrief and Isenberg from 1983 under the assumption on the surface gravity and generalises previous results due to Moncrief–Isenberg and Friedrich...

In a recent paper, we proved that solutions to linear wave equations in a subextremal Kerr-de Sitter spacetime have asymptotic expansions in quasinormal modes up to a decay order given by the normally hyperbolic trapping, extending the existing results. One central ingredient in the argument was a new definition of quasinormal modes, where a non-st...

We consider the heat equation associated to Schrödinger operators acting on vector bundles on asymptotically locally Euclidean (ALE) manifolds. Novel $L^p - L^q$ decay estimates are established, allowing the Schrödinger operator to have a non-trivial $L^2$-kernel. We also prove new decay estimates for spatial derivatives of arbitrary order, in a ge...

We prove that solutions to linear wave equations in a subextremal Kerr-de Sitter spacetime have asymptotic expansions in quasinormal modes up to a decay order given by the normally hyperbolic trapping, extending the existing results. The main novelties are a different way of obtaining a Fredholm setup that defines the quasinormal modes and a new an...

We prove that any compact Cauchy horizon with constant non-zero surface gravity in a smooth vacuum spacetime is a smooth Killing horizon. The novelty here is that the Killing vector field is shown to exist on both sides of the horizon. This generalises classical results by Moncrief and Isenberg, by dropping the assumption that the metric is analyti...

We prove a geometric characterization of all possible 4-dimensional real analytic vacuum spacetimes near non-degenerate Killing horizons. It is known that any such horizon admits a canonically induced real analytic Riemannian metric with a Killing vector field of constant length. In this paper we prove the converse statement: Every real analytic Ri...

We prove that quasinormal modes (or resonant states) for linear wave equations in the subextremal Kerr and Kerr-de Sitter spacetimes are real analytic. The main novelty of this paper is the observation that the bicharacteristic flow associated to the linear wave equations for quasinormal modes with respect to a suitable Killing vector field has a s...

We prove stability of integrable ALE manifolds with a parallel spinor under Ricci flow, given an initial metric which is close in $L^p \cap L^\infty$, for any $p \in (1, n)$, where $n$ is the dimension of the manifold. In particular, our result applies to all known examples of $4$-dimensional gravitational instantons. Our decay rates are strong eno...

We consider the long-time behaviour of the mean curvature flow of spacelike hypersurfaces in the Lorentzian product manifold \(M\times \mathbb {R}\), where M is asymptotically flat. If the initial hypersurface \(F_0\subset M\times \mathbb {R}\) is uniformly spacelike and asymptotic to \(M\times \left\{ s\right\} \) for some \(s\in \mathbb {R}\) at...

We consider the heat equation associated to Schr\"{o}dinger operators acting on vector bundles on asymptotically locally Euclidean (ALE) manifolds. Novel $L^p - L^q$ decay estimates are established, allowing the Schr\"{o}dinger operator to have a non-trivial $L^2$-kernel. We also prove new decay estimates for spatial derivatives of arbitrary order,...

We prove that any compact Cauchy horizon with constant non-zero surface gravity in a smooth vacuum spacetime is a Killing horizon. The novelty here is that the Killing vector field is shown to exist on both sides of the horizon. This generalises classical results by Moncrief and Isenberg, by dropping the assumption that the metric is analytic. In p...

We consider the long-time behaviour of the mean curvature flow of spacelike hypersurfaces in the Lorentzian product manifold $M\times\mathbb{R}$, where $M$ is asymptotically flat. If the initial hypersurface $F_0\subset M\times\mathbb{R}$ is uniformly spacelike and asymptotic to $M\times\left\{s\right\}$ for some $s\in\mathbb{R}$ at infinity, we sh...

We prove that any smooth vacuum spacetime containing a compact Cauchy horizon with surface gravity that can be normalised to a non-zero constant admits a Killing vector field. This proves a conjecture by Moncrief and Isenberg from 1983 under the assumption on the surface gravity and generalises previous results due to Moncrief-Isenberg and Friedric...

In this thesis, we study two initial value problems arising in general relativity. The first is the Cauchy problem for the linearised Einstein equation on general globally hyperbolic spacetimes, with smooth and distributional initial data. We extend well-known results by showing that given a solution to the linearised constraint equations of arbitr...

We study the following problem: Given initial data on a compact Cauchy horizon, does there exist a unique solution to wave equations on the globally hyperbolic region? Our main results apply to any spacetime satisfying the null energy condition and containing a compact non-degenerate Cauchy horizon. Examples include the Misner spacetime and the Tau...

We study the following problem: Given initial data on a compact Cauchy horizon, does there exist a unique solution to wave equations on the globally hyperbolic region? Our main results apply to any spacetime satisfying the null energy condition and containing a compact Cauchy horizon with surface gravity that can be normalised to a non-zero constan...

A classical problem in general relativity is the Cauchy problem for the linearised Einstein equation (the initial value problem for gravitational waves) on a globally hyperbolic vacuum spacetime. A well-known result is that it is uniquely solvable up to gauge solutions, given initial data on a spacelike Cauchy hypersurface. The solution map is an i...

A classical problem in general relativity is the Cauchy problem for the linearised Einstein equation (the initial value problem for gravitational waves) on a globally hyperbolic vacuum spacetime. A well-known result is that it is uniquely solvable up to gauge solutions, given initial data on a spacelike Cauchy hypersurface. The solution map is an i...

We study the mode solution to the Cauchy problem of the scalar wave equation $\square \varphi = 0$ in Kasner spacetimes. As a first result, we give the explicit mode solution in axisymmetric Kasner spacetimes, of which flat Kasner spacetimes are special cases. Furthermore, we give the small and large time asymptotics of the modes in general Kasner...