Uniform Boundedness for Solutions to the Teukolsky Equation on Schwarzschild from Conservation Laws of Linearised Gravity

TL;DR

This paper proves uniform boundedness of solutions to the Teukolsky equation on Schwarzschild spacetime by leveraging conservation laws of linearised gravity, without relying on the decoupled wave equation, thus advancing understanding of gravitational perturbations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to control Teukolsky quantities directly through conservation laws, avoiding dependence on the decoupled wave equation, and establishes uniform energy bounds for linearised gravity.

Findings

Uniform energy bounds for Teukolsky quantities along outgoing cones.

Control of energy fluxes along ingoing cones derived from outgoing bounds.

No reliance on the decoupled Teukolsky wave equation for estimates.

Abstract

We consider the equations of linearised gravity on the Schwarzschild spacetime in a double null gauge. Applying suitably commuted versions of the conservation laws derived in earlier work of the second author we establish control on the gauge invariant Teukolsky quantities $\alpha^{[\pm 2]}$ without any reference to the decoupled Teukolsky wave equation satisfied by these quantities. More specifically, we uniformly bound the energy flux of all first derivatives of $\alpha^{[\pm 2]}$ along any outgoing cone from an initial data quantity at the level of first derivatives of the linearised curvature and second derivatives of the linearised connection components. Analogous control on the energy fluxes along any ingoing cone is established a posteriori directly from the Teukolsky equation using the outgoing bounds.