The nonlinear stability of (n + 1)-dimensional FLRW spacetimes

Abstract

We prove nonlinear Lyapunov stability of a family of “([Formula: see text])”-dimensional cosmological models of general relativity locally isometric to the Friedman–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker (FLRW) spacetimes including a positive cosmological constant. In particular, we show that the perturbed solutions to the Einstein–Euler field equations around a class of spatially compact FLRW metrics (for which the spatial slices are compact negative Einstein spaces in general and hyperbolic for the physically relevant [Formula: see text] case) arising from regular Cauchy data remain uniformly bounded and decay to a family of metrics with constant negative spatial scalar curvature. To accomplish this result, we employ an energy method for the coupled Einstein–Euler field equations in constant mean extrinsic curvature spatial harmonic (CMCSH) gauge. In order to handle Euler’s equations, we construct energy from a current that is similar to the one derived by Christodoulou [The Formation of Shocks in 3-dimensional Fluids, EMS Monographs in Mathematics, Vol. 2 (European Mathematical Society, 2007)] (and which coincides with Christodoulou’s current on the Minkowski space) and show that this energy controls the desired norm of the fluid degrees of freedom. The use of a fluid energy current together with the CMCSH gauge condition casts the Einstein–Euler field equations into a coupled elliptic–hyperbolic system. Utilizing the estimates derived from the elliptic equations, we first show that the gravity-fluid energy functional remains uniformly bounded in the expanding direction. Using this uniform boundedness property, we later obtain sharp decay estimates if a positive cosmological constant [Formula: see text] is included, which confirms that the accelerated expansion of the physical universe that is induced by the positive cosmological constant is sufficient to control the nonlinearities in the case of small data. A few physical consequences of this stability result are discussed.