Stability in exponential time of Minkowski Space-time with a translation space-like Killing field

Abstract

In this paper, we prove the nonlinear stability in exponential time of Minkowki space-time with a translation space-like Killing field. In the presence of such a symmetry, the 3 + 1 vacuum Einstein equations reduce to the 2 + 1 Einstein equations with a scalar field. We work in generalised wave coordinates. In this gauge Einstein equations can be written as a system of quasilinear quadratic wave equations. The main difficulty in this paper is due to the decay in $\frac{1}{\sqrt{t}}$ of free solutions to the wave equation in 2 dimensions, which is weaker than in 3 dimensions. We have to rely on the particular structure of Einstein equations in wave coordinates. We also have to carefully choose the behaviour of our metric in the exterior region to enforce convergence to Minkowski space-time at time-like infinity.