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Analysis Seminar

Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - 4:30pm

Jared Speck

Princeton University

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL 4C8

The Einstein-nonlinear electromagnetic system is a coupling of the Einstein field equations of general relativity to a model of nonlinear electromagnetic fields. In this talk, I will discuss the family of covariant electromagnetic models that satisfy the following criteria: they are derivable from a sufficiently regular Lagrangian, they reduce to the linear Maxwell model in the weak-field limit, and their corresponding energy-momentum tensors satisfy the dominant energy condition. I will mention several specific electromagnetic models that are of interest to researchers working in the foundations of physics and in string theory. I will then discuss my main result, which is a proof of the global nonlinear stability of the $1 + 3-$dimensional Minkowski spacetime solution to the coupled system. This stability result is a consequence of a small-data global existence result for a reduced system of equations that is equivalent to the original system in a wave coordinate gauge. The analysis of the spacetime metric components is based on a framework recently developed by Lindblad and Rodnianski, which allows one to handle tensorial systems of quasilinear wave equations with nonlinearities that satisfy a weak version of the null condition. The analysis of the electromagnetic fields, which satisfy quasilinear first-order equations, is based on an extension of a geometric energy-method framework developed by Christodoulou, together with a collection of pointwise decay estimates for the Faraday tensor that I develop. Throughout the analysis, I work directly with the electromagnetic fields, thus avoiding the introduction of electromagnetic potentials.