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

Abstract

We prove a scale-invariant, semi-global existence result and a trapped surface formation result in the context of coupled Einstein-Yang-Mills theory, without symmetry assumptions. More precisely, we prove a scale-invariant semi-global existence theorem from past null-infinity and show that the focusing of the gravitational and/or chromoelectric-chromomagnetic waves could lead to the formation of a trapped surface. Adopting the signature for decay rates approach introduced in \cite{A19}, 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, yields the desired semi-global existence result. Once semi-global existence has been established, the formation of a trapped surface follows from a standard ODE argument.