Stability and instability of expanding solutions to the Lorentzian constant-positive-mean-curvature flow

Abstract

We study constant mean curvature Lorentzian hypersurfaces of $\mathbb{R}^{1,d+1}$ from the point of view of its Cauchy problem. We completely classify the spherically symmetric solutions, which include among them a manifold isometric to the de Sitter space of general relativity. We show that the spherically symmetric solutions exhibit one of three (future) asymptotic behaviours: (i) finite time collapse (ii) convergence to a time-like cylinder isometric to some $\mathbb{R}\times\mathbb{S}^d$ and (iii) infinite expansion to the future converging asymptotically to a time translation of the de Sitter solution. For class (iii) we examine the future stability properties of the solutions under arbitrary (not necessarily spherically symmetric) perturbations. We show that the usual notions of asymptotic stability and modulational stability cannot apply, and connect this to the presence of cosmological horizons in these class (iii) solutions. We can nevertheless show the global existence and future stability for small perturbations of class (iii) solutions under a notion of stability that naturally takes into account the presence of cosmological horizons. The proof is based on the vector field method, but requires additional geometric insight. In particular we introduce two new tools: an inverse-Gauss-map gauge to deal with the problem of cosmological horizon and a quasilinear generalisation of Brendle's Bel-Robinson tensor to obtain natural energy quantities.