Nonlinear stability of subextremal Kerr black holes

Abstract

We settle the global nonlinear stability problem for the family of Kerr black holes in the full subextremal range: spacetimes evolving from initial data close to those of a subextremal Kerr black hole as solutions of the Einstein vacuum equation ${\rm Ric}(g)=0$ settle down to a nearby member of the Kerr family at the rate $\mathcal{O}(t_*^{-2-ε_{\mathcal K}})$ in spatially compact regions. For the initial data, we require $\mathcal{O}(r^{-1-ε_0})$-decay for $ε_0>0$ -- more precisely, an arbitrary but finite expansion into terms $r^{-z}(\log r)^k$ where $z>1$, $k\in\mathbb{N}_0$, plus a remainder term with $\mathcal{O}(r^{-3-ε_0})$-decay. Similarly to previous work with Vasy in the Kerr-de Sitter setting, we use a generalized wave map gauge modified using gauge source terms that lie in a suitable finite-dimensional space determined by the expansion of the initial data. Like the final black hole parameters (mass and angular momentum) and the gravitational wave tail, the gauge source terms are treated as unknowns in a nonlinear (Nash-Moser) iteration scheme. We work directly with the tensorial equation and in particular do not rely on reductions to scalar equations (except insofar as a reduction to the Teukolsky equation is used in the proof of linear mode stability). This paper relies on two companion papers by the author. The first one introduces a strong form of constraint damping in the full subextremal range, which we use in our formulation of the gauge-fixed Einstein equation as a black box. The second one provides tame estimates (albeit with weak decay) for forward solutions of a general class of wave-type equations, which we show here to include the linearizations of the gauge-fixed Einstein equation arising in our nonlinear iteration scheme; these estimates are the starting point for our detailed asymptotic analysis.