Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

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Description

 I will discuss recent work on the construction of asymptotically flat vacuum initial data sets in General Relativity via the conformal method. My collaborators (Lydia Bieri, David Garfinkle, Jim Isenberg, and David Maxwell) and I have demonstrated that certain asymptotic structures may be prescribed a priori through the method's seed data, including the ADM momentum components, the leading- and next-to-leading-order decay rates, and anisotropy in the metric's mass term, yielding a recipe to construct initial data sets with desired asymptotics. As an application, we discuss a simple numerical example, with stronger asymptotics than have been presented in previous work, of an initial data set whose evolution does not exhibit a physically conjectured antipodal symmetry between future and past null infinity.