Virtual Talk: Null hypersurfaces and the Penrose inequality for a perturbed Schwarzschild black hole

Pengyu Le
University of Michigan

The Penrose inequality is a renowned inequality in GR proposed by Penrose in 1973. It conjectures a simple relation between the total mass of spacetime and the area of a black hole inside it. Penrose’s original physical argument supporting this inequality relates it to some most important and challenging problems in GR, like the final state of the evolution of black holes and naked singularities (the weak cosmic censorship conjecture).
A major breakthrough was achieved independently by Huisken, Ilmanen and by Bray, proving the Riemannian Penrose inequality. Besides the Riemannian case, there is another important case of the inequality on null hypersurfaces which is still open. The speaker will present his work confirming the null Penrose inequality on null hypersurfaces for a perturbed Schwarzschild black hole. A major ingredient of the work is the study on perturbations of null hypersurfaces.


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