Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2603.14638

Nonlinear Wave Dynamics in Black Hole Spacetimes

Abstract

This manuscript is a lightly reformatted version of my 2017 PhD thesis. I am posting it on arXiv at the request of my advisor, Sergiu Klainerman, who noted that it has been useful to some students. The content largely reflects the thesis in its original form. This thesis details a method for proving global boundedness and decay results for nonlinear wave equations on black hole spacetimes. The method is applied to five example problems of increasing difficulty. The first problem, which addresses the semilinear wave equation on Minkowski space, is quite simple and should be accessible to a reader who is still new to the field of partial differential equations. The final problem, which was posed by Ionescu and Klainerman in [IK14], constitutes a step toward proving stability for slowly rotating Kerr black holes. The remaining intermediate problems are: a semilinear wave equation on the Schwarzschild spacetime, a semilinear wave equation on any subextremal Kerr spacetime with the additional assumption of axisymmetry, and a restriction of the final problem to the Schwarzschild case. The method used in this thesis is based on a few particular developments that may be useful for other related problems. These include: a new method for constructing Morawetz-type estimates that is fairly robust (insofar as it may be successfully applied to all five problems), a strategy based on a decay hierarchy for energy estimates on uniformly spacelike hypersurfaces using, in particular, a notion of weak decay, and a technique for handling certain terms with factors that are singular on an axis of symmetry.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

John Stogin. 2026-03-15. Nonlinear Wave Dynamics in Black Hole Spacetimes. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14638

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Multilayered fluid-structure interactions: existence of weak solutions for time-periodic and initial-value problems

We establish the existence of weak solutions for a class of fully coupled multilayered fluid-structure interaction systems in a three-dimensional spatial setting. The model consists of an incompressible viscous fluid interacting with a thin elastic shell, which is in turn coupled to a three-dimensional elastic solid, yielding a nonstandard $3D/2D/3D$ coupling configuration. The system is driven by time-periodic boundary forcing through Bernoulli-type pressure conditions. For sufficiently small forcing in $L^2$, we prove the existence of at least one time-periodic weak solution. A central analytical difficulty stems from the strong nonlinear coupling across interfaces of different dimensionality and the absence of classical compactness mechanisms. This challenge is overcome through a carefully designed energy framework combined with and new $L^{2}$ compactness arguments adapted to the multilayered geometry. A key structural assumption is the viscoelasticity of the three-dimensional solid, which yields additional diffusion estimates and ensures energy stability. In the purely elastic case, we establish the global-in-time existence of weak solutions to the corresponding initial-value problem, provided that no degeneration (self-contact) of the fluid domain occurs. These results extend existing theories for two-dimensional and reduced-dimensional configurations to a genuinely three-dimensional multilayered setting, providing new analytical insight into complex coupled PDE systems arising in fluid-structure interaction.

math.AP

A linear test approach to global controllability of third- and fifth-order nonlinear dispersive equations

We investigate third- and fifth-order nonlinear dispersive equations of KdV type on the torus and establishes approximate controllability by a fixed four-dimensional control; rather than relying solely on the saturation machinery, the analysis exploits the finite-dimensional controllability of the inviscid Burgers equation linearized around a carefully constructed return trajectory, with the trajectory itself obtained from an observable family. This ``linear test" strategy, yields more information about the structure of the control than the standard approach. In particular, the constructed control is shown to depend continuously on the initial and target states, a property that is by no means automatic in nonlinear control problems, and to decompose as a bounded linear operator applied to the data plus a fixed remainder, with the operator part interestingly independent of the order of dispersion.

math.AP

Global in-time rough large data solution to complex-valued semilinear damped evolution equations

We study the semilinear Cauchy problem for complex-valued damped evolution equations \begin{align*} \partial_t^2u+(-Δ)^σu+(-Δ)^δ\partial_tu=u^p,\ \ u(0,x)=u_0(x),\ \partial_tu(0,x)=u_1(x), \end{align*} with $δ\in[0,σ]$, $σ\in\mathbb{R}_+$ and $p\in\mathbb{N}_+\backslash\{1\}$, where the initial data belong to the rough space $E^α_s$ endowed with the norm \begin{align*} \|f\|_{E^α_s}=\big\|\langleξ\rangle^s\,2^{α|ξ|}\widehat{f}(ξ)\big\|_{L^2}\ \ \mbox{with}\ \ α<0, \ s\in\mathbb{R}. \end{align*} Concerning $(u_0,u_1)\in E^α_{s+\barκ}\times E^α_s$ when $s\geqslant\frac{n}{2}-\frac{2κ+\barκ-2δ}{p-1}-\barκ$ with $κ=\min\{2δ,σ\}$ and $\barκ=\max\{2δ,σ\}$ whose Fourier transforms are supported in a suitable subset of first octant, we prove a global in-time existence result without requiring the smallness of rough initial data.

math.AP