Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

I will discuss the linear stability of weakly charged and slowly rotating Kerr-Newman black holes under coupled gravitational and electromagnetic perturbations. We show that the solutions to the linearized Einstein-Maxwell equations decay at an inverse polynomial rate to a linearized Kerr-Newman solution plus a pure gauge term. The proof uses tools from microlocal analysis and a detailed description of the resolvent of the Fourier transformed linearized Einstein-Maxwell operator at low frequencies.

Solitons are particle-like solutions to dispersive evolution equations 
whose shapes persist as time goes by. In some situations, these solitons 
appear due to the balance between nonlinear effects and dispersion, in 
other situations their existence is related to topological properties of 
the model. Broadly speaking, they form the building blocks for the 
long-time dynamics of dispersive equations.

In this talk I will present joint work with W. Schlag on long-time decay 
estimates for co-dimension one type perturbations of the soliton for the 
1D focusing cubic Klein-Gordon equation (up to exponential time scales), 
and I will discuss our previous work on the asymptotic stability of the 
sine-Gordon kink under odd perturbations. While these two problems are 
quite similar at first sight, we will see that they differ by a subtle 
cancellation property, which has significant consequences for the 
long-time dynamics of the perturbations of the respective solitons.

We consider the 1+1 dimensional vector valued Principal Chiral Field model (PCF) obtained as a simplification of the Vacuum Einstein Field equations under the Belinski-Zakharov symmetry. PCF is an integrable model, but a rigorous description of its evolution is far from complete. Here we provide the existence of local solutions in a suitable chosen energy space, as well as small global smooth solutions under a certain non degeneracy condition. We also construct virial functionals which provide a clear description of decay of smooth global solutions inside the light cone. Finally, some applications are presented in the case of PCF solitons, a first step towards the study of its nonlinear stability. 

Smooth ergodic theory provides a framework for studying systems exhibiting dynamical chaos, features of which include sensitive dependence with respect to initial conditions, correlation decay (even for deterministic systems!) and complicated fractal-like attractor geometry. This talk will be an overview of some of these ideas as they apply to evolutionary PDE, with an emphasis on dissipative semilinear parabolic problems, and a discussion of some of my work in this direction, joint with: Lai-Sang Young and Sam Punshon-Smith.