Geons and the Instability of Anti-de Sitter Spacetime

TL;DR

This paper reviews the instability of anti-de Sitter spacetime, introduces the concept of geons as stable solutions, and presents their numerical construction along with discussion of their properties.

Contribution

It provides the first explicit numerical construction of geons in anti-de Sitter spacetime, demonstrating their existence and exploring their characteristics.

Findings

Anti-de Sitter spacetime is nonlinearly unstable.

Geons are nonsingular, helical symmetric solutions to Einstein's equations.

Numerical evidence supports the existence of geons in AdS spacetime.

Abstract

We briefly review the evidence that anti-de Sitter spacetime is nonlinearly unstable, and the perturbative arguments that there should exist geons - nonsingular solutions to Einstein's equation with a helical symmetry. We then explicitly construct these geons numerically and discuss some of their properties. We conclude with some open questions.