The stability of Killing-Cauchy horizons in colliding plane wave space-times (Q2487341)

The author shows that the Killing-Cauchy horizons that sometimes occur in the interaction region of colliding gravitational waves are unstable with respect to bounded perturbations of the initial waves when the initial waves have constant aligned polarization. This is an important result as previously the horizons were known to be unstable but the perturbations themselves introduced singularities in the initial waves prior to collision. This new rigorous result is made possible by recently developed techniques which allow colliding plane wave solutions to be explicitly constructed from the characteristic initial data representing the approaching waves.