The Analysis and PDE seminar will take place Monday, May 8, in 740 Evans Hall, from 16:10-17:00.

Title: Strong cosmic censorship in spherical symmetry for two-ended asymptotically flat initial data

Abstract: Black holes are perhaps the most celebrated predictions of general relativity. Miraculously, stationary black hole spacetimes arise as explicit (i.e., exact expression can be written down!) solutions to the (vacuum) Einstein equation. Looking at these explicit solutions leads to an intriguing observation: While the black hole exterior looks qualitatively similar, the structure of the interior, in particular the nature of the `singularity’ inside the black hole, changes drastically depending on whether the black hole is spinning (Kerr) or not (Schwarzschild).

The topic of this talk is the strong cosmic censorship conjecture of R. Penrose, which is a proposed picture for what happens generically. In particular, I will present a recent work, joint with Jonathan Luk, where we establish a version of strong cosmic censorship for the Einstein-Maxwell-(real)-scalar-field system in spherical symmetry with two-ended asymptotically flat data, a toy model
that has been studied by physicists and mathematicians to understand issues connected to strong cosmic censorship in a simplified setting.