Global exterior stability of the Minkowski space: Coupled Einstein–Yang–Mills perturbations

Abstract

Here we prove a global gauge-invariant radiation estimates for the perturbations of the 3 + 1 dimensional Minkowski spacetime in the presence of Yang–Mills sources. In particular, we obtain a novel gauge invariant estimate for the Yang–Mills fields coupled to gravity in a double null framework in the Causal complement of a compact set of a Cauchy slice. A consequence of our result is the global exterior stability of the Minkowski space under coupled Yang–Mills perturbations. A special structure present both in the null Bianchi equations and the null Yang–Mills equations is utilized crucially to obtain the dispersive estimates necessary to conclude the global existence property. Direct use of Bel-Robinson and Yang–Mills stress-energy tensor to obtain the energy estimates is avoided in favor of weighted integration by parts taking advantage of the manifestly symmetric hyperbolic characteristics of null Bianchi and null Yang–Mills equations. Our result holds for any compact semi-simple gauge group. This is the first stability result of Minkowski space including a non-linear source.