The idea of Littlewood-Paley theory is as follows (see [1] for a good exposition of this). Suppose that we want to
describe the regularity of a function (or, more generally, a
tempered distribution)
u
on
. Differentiability properties of
u
correspond, roughly speaking, to fall-off properties of its
Fourier transform
. This is because the Fourier transform converts differentiation
into multiplication. The Fourier transform is decomposed as
, where
is a dyadic partition of unity. The statement that it is dyadic
means that all the
except one are obtained from each other by scaling the argument
by a factor which is a power of two. Transforming back we get the
decomposition
, where
is the inverse Fourier transform of
. The component
of
u
contains only frequencies of the order
. In studying rough solutions of the Einstein equations, the
Littlewood-Paley decomposition is applied to the metric itself.
The high frequencies are discarded to obtain a smoothed metric
which plays an important role in the arguments.
Another important element of the proofs is to rescale the
solution by a factor depending on the cut-off
applied in the Littlewood-Paley decomposition. Proving the
desired estimates then comes down to proving the existence of the
rescaled solutions on a time interval depending on
in a particular way. The rescaled data are small in some sense
and so a connection is established to the question of long-time
existence of solutions of the Einstein equation for small initial
data. In this way, techniques from the work of Christodoulou and
Klainerman on the stability of Minkowski space (see Section
5.2) are brought in.
What is finally proved? In general, there is a close
connection between proving local existence for data in a certain
space and showing that the time of existence of smooth solutions
depends only on the norm of the data in the given space.
Klainerman and Rodnianski [157] demonstrate that the time of existence of solutions of the
reduced Einstein equations in harmonic coordinates depends only
on the
norm of the initial data for any
. The reason that this does not allow them to assert an existence
result in the same space is that the constraints are needed in
their proof and that an understanding of solving the constraints
at this low level of differentiability is lacking.
The techniques discussed in this section, which have been stimulated by the desire to understand the Einstein equations, are also helpful in understanding other nonlinear wave equations. Thus, this is an example where information can flow from general relativity to the theory of partial differential equations.
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Theorems on Existence and Global Dynamics for the
Einstein Equations
Alan D. Rendall http://www.livingreviews.org/lrr-2002-6 © Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. ISSN 1433-8351 Problems/Comments to livrev@aei-potsdam.mpg.de |