English

Stability for linearized gravity on the Kerr spacetime

Analysis of PDEs 2025-04-17 v3 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

In this paper we prove integrated energy and pointwise decay estimates for solutions of the vacuum linearized Einstein equation on the domain of outer communication of the Kerr black hole spacetime. The estimates are valid for the full subextreme range of Kerr black holes, provided integrated energy estimates for the Teukolsky equation hold. For slowly rotating Kerr backgrounds, such estimates are known to hold, due to the work of one of the authors. The results in this paper thus provide the first stability results for linearized gravity on the Kerr background, in the slowly rotating case, and reduce the linearized stability problem for the full subextreme range to proving integrated energy estimates for the Teukolsky equation. This constitutes an essential step towards a proof of the black hole stability conjecture, i.e. the statement that the Kerr family is dynamically stable, one of the central open problems in general relativity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1903.03859,
  title  = {Stability for linearized gravity on the Kerr spacetime},
  author = {Lars Andersson and Thomas Bäckdahl and Pieter Blue and Siyuan Ma},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.03859},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Updated introduction. Added appendix. 111 pages. Corresponds with published version

R2 v1 2026-06-23T08:03:09.831Z