I will describe joint work with Dietrich Häfner and András Vasy in which we study the asymptotic behavior of linearized gravitational perturbations of Schwarzschild or slowly rotating Kerr black hole spacetimes. We show that solutions of the linearized Einstein equation decay at an inverse polynomial rate to a stationary solution (given by an infinitesimal variation of the mass and angular momentum of the black hole), plus a pure gauge term. The proof uses a detailed description of the resolvent of an associated wave equation on symmetric 2-tensors near zero energy.

Bio: Peter Hintz is a German mathematician. Hintz earned his doctorate from Stanford University in 2015 under the supervision of András Vasy. Following a postdoc at UC Berkeley, he moved to MIT in 2018 as a Clay Research Fellow and joined the mathematics department as an assistant professor in 2019. His research is largely concerned with hyperbolic PDE arising in general relativity and nonlinear stability problems.