Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

Return to Colloquia & Seminar listing

High frequency limits and Burnett's conjecture in general relativity

PDE and Applied Math Seminar

Speaker: Jonathan Luk, Stanford University
Related Webpage: https://web.stanford.edu/~jluk/
Location: 2112 MSB
Start time: Fri, May 10 2019, 4:10PM

It is known in the physics literature that "high-frequency weak limits" of solutions to the Einstein vacuum equations are not necessarily vacuum solutions, but may have a non-trivial stress-energy-momentum tensor, which can be viewed physically as “effective matter fields” arising from back-reaction of high frequency gravitational waves. Burnett conjectured nonetheless that any such limit is isometric to a solution to the Einstein-massless Vlasov system. We prove that Burnett's conjecture is true under a symmetry assumption and a gauge condition. This is a joint work with Cécile Huneau.