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Sam Collingbourne (University of Edinburgh) – The Gregory-Laflamme Instability of the Schwarzschild Black String

Category
Geometry and Analysis
Date
@ Roger Stevens LT11
Date
@ Roger Stevens LT11, 15:00
Location
Roger Stevens LT11
Speaker
Sam Collingbourne
Affiliation
University of Edinburgh

Gregory-Laflamme type instabilities seem to plague black holes in dimensions greater than 4. Gregory-Laflamme instabilities are exponentially growing solutions to the linearised Einstein vacuum equation and have been identified heuristically and numerically for black holes that have an event horizon that has one direction that is large compared to all others. In this talk, I will discuss a direct rigorous mathematical proof of the Gregory-Laflamme instability for the 5D Schwarzschild black string. The proof relies upon reducing the linearised vacuum Einstein equation to a Schrödinger equation to which direct variational methods can be applied.