The maximal slicing of a Schwarzschild black hole

Abstract

We describe recent work due to Niall \'O Murchadha and the author (Phys. Rev. D57, 4728 (1998)) on the late time behaviour of the maximal foliation of the extended Schwarzschild geometry which results from evolving a time symmetric slice into the past and future, with time running equally fast at both spatial ends of the manifold. We study the lapse function of this foliation in the limit where proper time-at-infinity goes to ${+\infty}$ or ${-\infty}$ and the slices approach $r=3m/2$.