Rigidity of marginally outer trapped \(2\)-spheres (Q1693876)

In this well-written article the authors prove an area inequality for a marginally outer trapped 2-sphere (a spherical MOTS) in a matter-filled spacetime, perhaps with positive cosmological constant. In the area-saturating case they also obtain a local splitting theorem around this 2-sphere for the corresponding initial data set allowing a local embedding of the initial data set as a spacelike hypersurface into the Narai spacetime. The connections to minimal surface theory in 3-manifolds and the topology of black holes as well as to Vaidya spacetime and dynamical horizons are also discussed. More precisely, let \((M,g,k,\mu ,J)\) be a non-vacuum initial data set with matter's energy-density \(\mu\not=0\) and 3-current \(J\); suppose there exists a spherical MOTS \(\Sigma\subset M\) and \(c>0\) such that \(\mu-g(J,n)\geqq c\) along \(\Sigma\) where \(n\) is the outward unit normal of \(\Sigma\) (the positivity of \(\mu -| J|_g\) along the whole \(M\) implies the validity of the dominant energy condition in the Cauchy development spacetime that is, for an observer the speed of material energy flow is locally always less than the speed of light). Then \(\mathrm{Area}(\Sigma )\leqq 4\pi/c\) holds (see Proposition 3.1 for a more accurate and complete formulation). Moreover, in the case of equality and if \(\Sigma\) is separating in \(M\) there exists a one-sided open neighbourhood \(U\cong [0,\varepsilon )\times\Sigma\) of \(\Sigma\) within \(M\) such that \((U,g|_U)\) is isometric to \(([0,\varepsilon )\times\Sigma, -\mathrm dt^2+h)\) where \(h\) is the round metric on \(\Sigma\cong S^2\) of radius \(\frac{1}{\sqrt{c}}\) (see Theorem 3.2 for a more accurate and complete formulation). Finally, \((U,g|_U)\) can be embedded into the 4-dimensional Narai spacetime as a spacelike hypersurface so that \(g|_U\) is the induced metric and \(k|_U\) is the second fundamental form of \(U\) within the Narai spacetime (see Theorem 4.1 and Section 4 regarding the Narai spacetime).