Asymptotic Stability of Minkowski Space-Time with Non-compactly Supported Massless Vlasov Matter

Journal article, 2021

We prove the global asymptotic stability of the Minkowski space for the massless Einstein–Vlasov system in wave coordinates. In contrast with previous work on the subject, no compact support assumptions on the initial data of the Vlasov field in space or the momentum variables are required. In fact, the initial decay in v is optimal. The present proof is based on vector field and weighted vector field techniques for Vlasov fields, as developed in previous work of Fajman, Joudioux, and Smulevici, and heavily relies on several structural properties of the massless Vlasov equation, similar to the null and weak null conditions. To deal with the weak decay rate of the metric, we propagate well-chosen hierarchized weighted energy norms which reflect the strong decay properties satisfied by the particle density far from the light cone. A particular analytical difficulty arises at the top order, when we do not have access to improved pointwise decay estimates for certain metric components. This difficulty is resolved using a novel hierarchy in the massless Einstein–Vlasov system, which exploits the propagation of different growth rates for the energy norms of different metric components.