General Relativity Seminar

Speaker: Nikolaos Athanasiou (University of Crete, Greece)

Title: Formation of trapped surfaces in the Einstein-Yang-Mills system

Abstract: The purpose of this talk is to give an overview of a semi-global existence result and a trapped surface formation results in the context of the Einstein-Yang-Mills system. Adopting a “signature for decay rates” approach first introduced by An, we develop a novel gauge (and scale) invariant hierarchy of non-linear estimates for the Yang-Mills curvature which, together with the estimates for the gravitational degrees of freedom, yield the desired semi-global existence result. Once semi-global existence has been established, we will explain how the formation of a trapped surface follows from a standard ODE argument. This is joint work with Puskar Mondal and Shing-Tung Yau.