The Global Future Stability of the FLRW Solutions to the Dust-Einstein System with a Positive Cosmological Constant

Abstract

We study small perturbations of the well-known family of Friedman-Lema\^{\i}tre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) solutions to the dust-Einstein system with a positive cosmological constant in the case that the spacelike Cauchy hypersurfaces are diffeomorphic to T^3. These solutions model a quiet pressureless fluid in a dynamic spacetime undergoing accelerated expansion. We show that the FLRW solutions are nonlinearly globally future-stable under small perturbations of their initial data. Our analysis takes place relative to a harmonic-type coordinate system, in which the cosmological constant results in the presence of dissipative terms in the evolution equations. Our result extends the results of [38,44,42], where analogous results were proved for the Euler-Einstein system under the equations of state p = c_s^2 \rho, 0<c_s^2 <= 1/3. The dust-Einstein system is the Euler-Einstein system with c_s=0. The main difficulty that we overcome is that the energy density of the dust loses one degree of differentiability compared to the cases 0 < c_s^2 <= 1/3. Because the dust-Einstein equations are coupled, this loss of differentiability introduces new obstacles for deriving estimates for the top-order derivatives of all solution variables. To resolve this difficulty, we commute the equations with a well-chosen differential operator and derive a collection of elliptic estimates that complement the energy estimates of [38,44]. An important feature of our analysis is that we are able to close our estimates even though the top-order derivatives of all solution variables can grow much more rapidly than in the cases 0<c_s^2 <= 1/3. Our results apply in particular to small compact perturbations of the vanishing dust state.