The formation of black holes in general relativity
Demetrios Christodoulou, ETH-Zurich, Switzerland
Abstract:
I shall talk about my recent monograph, the subject of
which is the formation of black holes in pure general relativity, by the
focusing of incoming gravitational waves. The theorems established in
the monograph constitute the first foray into the long time dynamics
of general relativity in the large, that is, when the initial data are no
longer confined to a suitably small neighborhood of Minkowskian data.
The theorems are general, no symmetry conditions on the initial data
being imposed. The central new idea is something that applies to all
systems of Euler- Lagrange equations of hyperbolic type and provides
the means by which many problems can be solved which have seemed
unapproachable.
P.S. The monograph I am referring to is posted on arxiv at:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0805.3880v1