The stability of the Minkowski space for the Einstein–Vlasov system

Abstract

We prove the global stability of the Minkowski space viewed as the trivial solution of the Einstein–Vlasov system. To estimate the Vlasov field, we use the vector field and modified vector field techniques we previously developed in 2017. In particular, the initial support in the velocity variable does not need to be compact. To control the effect of the large velocities, we identify and exploit several structural properties of the Vlasov equation to prove that the worst nonlinear terms in the Vlasov equation either enjoy a form of the null condition or can be controlled using the wave coordinate gauge. The basic propagation estimates for the Vlasov field are then obtained using only weak interior decay for the metric components. Since some of the error terms are not time-integrable, several hierarchies in the commuted equations are exploited to close the top-order estimates. For the Einstein equations, we use wave coordinates and the main new difficulty arises from the commutation of the energy-momentum tensor, which needs to be rewritten using the modified vector fields.