Initial data for Minkowski stability with arbitrary decay

TL;DR

This paper develops a method to construct initial data for Einstein's equations near Minkowski spacetime with arbitrary decay, including mass terms, addressing challenges posed by symmetries and obstructions.

Contribution

It introduces a simplified conformal approach and a fixed point method to generate a broad class of initial data with prescribed decay properties, including black hole perturbations.

Findings

Constructed initial data with arbitrary decay and mass terms.

Addressed linear obstructions via a truncated black hole approach.

Provided a framework for stability analysis of Minkowski spacetime.

Abstract

We construct and parametrize solutions to the constraint equations of general relativity in a neighborhood of Minkowski spacetime with arbitrary prescribed decay properties at infinity. We thus provide a large class of initial data for the results on stability of Minkowski which include a mass term in the asymptotics. Due to the symmetries of Minkowski, a naive linear perturbation fails. Our construction is based on a simplified conformal method, a reduction to transverse traceless perturbations and a nonlinear fixed point argument where we face linear obstructions coming from the cokernels of both the linearized constraint operator and the Laplace operator. To tackle these obstructions, we introduce a well-chosen truncated black hole around which to perturb. The control of the parameters of the truncated black hole is the most technical part of the proof, since its center of mass and angular momentum could be arbitrarily large.