Lectures on Linear Stability of Rotating Black Holes

Abstract

These lecture notes are concerned with linear stability of the non-extreme Kerr geometry under perturbations of general spin. After a brief review of the Kerr black hole and its symmetries, we describe these symmetries by Killing fields and work out the connection to conservation laws. The Penrose process and superradiance effects are discussed. Decay results on the long-time behavior of Dirac waves are outlined. It is explained schematically how the Maxwell equations and the equations for linearized gravitational waves can be decoupled to obtain the Teukolsky equation. It is shown how the Teukolsky equation can be fully separated to a system of coupled ordinary differential equations. Linear stability of the non-extreme Kerr black hole is stated as a pointwise decay result for solutions of the Cauchy problem for the Teukolsky equation. The stability proof is outlined, with an emphasis on the underlying ideas and methods.

25 pages, LaTeX, 3 figures, lectures given at first DOMOSCHOOL in July 2018, minor improvements (published version)

References in corpus (7)

• The global non-linear stability of the Kerr-de Sitter family of black holes
• The Continuum Limit of Causal Fermion Systems
• Mode stability on the real axis
• Linear Stability of the Non-Extreme Kerr Black Hole
• Linear Stability of Schwarzschild Spacetime: Decay of Metric Coefficients
• Boundedness and decay for the Teukolsky equation on Kerr spacetimes I: the case $|a|\ll M$
• Linear Stability of Rotating Black Holes: Outline of the Proof