The nonlinear future stability of the FLRW family of solutions to the irrotational Euler–Einstein system with a positive cosmological constant

Abstract

In this article, we study small perturbations of the family of Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker cosmological background solutions to the coupled Euler-Einstein system with a positive cosmological constant in $1 + 3$ spacetime dimensions. The background solutions model an initially uniform quiet fluid of positive energy density evolving in a spacetime undergoing exponentially accelerated expansion. Our nonlinear analysis shows that under the equation of state $p = c^2 \rho, 0 < c^2 < 1/3$, the background metric + fluid solutions are globally future-stable under small irrotational perturbations of their initial data. In particular, we prove that the perturbed spacetime solutions, which have the topological structure $\[0,\infty) X T^3$, are future causally geodesically complete. Our analysis is based on a combination of energy estimates and pointwise decay estimates for quasilinear wave equations featuring dissipative inhomogeneous terms. Our main new contribution is showing that when $0 < c^2 < 1/3$, exponential spacetime expansion is strong enough to suppress the formation of fluid shocks. This contrasts against a well-known result of Christodoulou, who showed that in Minkowski spacetime, the corresponding constant-state irrotational fluid solutions are unstable.