Late-time tails of self-gravitating waves

Late-time tails of self-gravitating waves

Tue, 03/11/2009
12:00 		Piotr Bizon (Jagiellonian University) Relativity Seminar Add to calendar L3
Late-time tails of self-gravitating waves
I will present recent joint work with Tadek Chmaj and Andrzej Rostworowski concerning late-time behavior of self-gravitating massless fields.  We show that the asymptotic convergence to a static equilibrium (Minkowski or Schwarzschild) is an essentially nonlinear phenomenon which cannot, despite many assertions to the contrary in the literature, be properly described by the theory of linearized perturbations on a fixed static asymptotically flat background (so called Price's tails). To substantiate this claim in the case of small initial data we compute the late-time tails (both the decay rate and the amplitude) in four and higher even spacetime dimensions using nonlinear perturbation theory and we verify the results numerically. The reason for considering this problem in higher dimensions was motivated by the desire to demonstrate an accidental and misleading character of equality of decay rates of linear and nonlinear tails in four dimensions.