Decay of waves in gravitational solitons
Speaker:
Sharmila Gunasekaran
Date and Time:
Wednesday, September 21, 2022 - 3:10pm to 4:00pm
Location:
Fields Institute, Room 210
Abstract:
Gravitational solitons are globally stationary, horizonless asymptotically flat spacetimes with positive energy. I will address the stability of a particular family of solitons at the simplest level by investigating solutions to the linear wave equation. I will describe a methodology to prove that massless scalar waves in this family of soliton spacetimes cannot decay faster than inverse logarithmically in time. This slow decay can be attributed to the stable trapping of null geodesics and is suggestive of instability at the nonlinear level. This is joint work with Hari Kunduri.