Shock wave interactions and the Riemann-flat condition: the geometry behind metric smoothing and the existence of locally inertial frames in general relativity

DOI10.1007/S00205-019-01456-8MaRDI QIDQ2297686zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Moritz Reintjes, Blake Temple

Publication date 20 February 2020

Published in Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.02390

zbMATH Keywords

essential smoothnessgravitational metricregularity singularitiesRiemann-flat conditionshock wave metrics

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Einstein equations (35Q76) Special Riemannian manifolds (Einstein, Sasakian, etc.) (53C25) Applications of global differential geometry to the sciences (53C80) Einstein's equations (general structure, canonical formalism, Cauchy problems) (83C05) Macroscopic interaction of the gravitational field with matter (hydrodynamics, etc.) (83C55)

Abstract: We prove that the essential smoothness of the gravitational metric at shock waves in GR, a PDE regularity issue for weak solutions of the Einstein equations, is determined by a geometrical condition which we introduce and name the {it Riemann-flat condition}. The Riemann-flat condition determines whether or not the essential smoothness of the gravitational metric is two full derivatives more regular than the Riemann curvature tensor. This provides a geometric framework for the open problem as to whether {it regularity singularities} (points where the curvature is in $L^{i}nfty$ but the essential smoothness of the gravitational metric is only Lipschitz continuous) can be created by shock wave interaction in GR, or whether metrics Lipschitz at shocks can always be smoothed one level to $C^{1,1}$ by coordinate transformation. As a corollary of the ideas we give a proof that locally inertial frames always exist in a natural sense for shock wave metrics in spherically symmetric spacetimes, independent of whether the metric itself can be smoothed to $C^{1,1}$ locally. This latter result yields an explicit procedure (analogous to Riemann Normal Coordinates in smooth spacetimes) for constructing locally inertial coordinates for Lipschitz metrics, and is a new regularity result for GR solutions constructed by the Glimm scheme.

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Cites work

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Cited in

(12)

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• Mini-workshop: Relativistic fluids at the intersection of mathematics and physics. Abstracts from the mini-workshop held December 13--19, 2020 (online meeting)
• ``Regularity singularities and the scattering of gravity waves in approximate locally inertial frames
• How to smooth a crinkled map of space-time: Uhlenbeck compactness for \(L^\infty\) connections and optimal regularity for general relativistic shock waves by the Reintjes-Temple equations
• Points of general relativistic shock wave interaction are `regularity singularities' where space-time is not locally flat
• Retraction: Points of general relativistic shock wave interaction are `regularity singularities' where space-time is not locally flat
• No regularity singularities exist at points of general relativistic shock wave interaction between shocks from different characteristic families
• On the optimal regularity implied by the assumptions of geometry. I: Connections on tangent bundles
• On weak solutions to the geodesic equation in the presence of curvature bounds
• Strong cosmic censorship with bounded curvature
• Global existence of a classical solution for the isentropic nozzle flow

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