The global stability of the Kaluza-Klein spacetime

Abstract

In this paper we show the classical global stability of the flat Kaluza-Klein spacetime, which corresponds to Minkowski spacetime in $\m R^{1+4}$ with one direction compactified on a circle. We consider small perturbations which are allowed to vary in all directions including the compact direction. These perturbations lead to the creation of massless modes and Klein-Gordon modes. On the analytic side, this leads to a PDE system coupling wave equations to an infinite sequence of Klein-Gordon equations with different masses. The techniques we use are based purely in physical space using the vectorfield method.