This process, sometimes referred to as “hyperbolic reduction” consists of several steps. First, one needs to break the invariance of the equations. By imposing suitable gauge conditions one can specify a coordinate system, a linear reference frame, and a conformal factor. Then, the equations can be written as equations for the components of the geometric quantities with respect to the chosen frame in the chosen conformal gauge and as functions of the chosen coordinates. In the next step, one needs to extract from the equations a subsystem of propagation equations that is hyperbolic so that it has a well-posed initial value problem. It is often referred to as the “reduced equations”. Finally, one has to make sure that solutions of the reduced system give rise to solutions of the full system. This step may involve the verification that the gauge conditions imposed are compatible with the propagation equations, or that other equations (constraints) not included in the reduced system are preserved under the propagation. The first two steps, choice of gauge and extraction of the reduced system, are very much related. Gauge conditions should be imposed such that they lead to a hyperbolic reduced system. Furthermore, the gauge conditions should be such that they can be imposed locally without loss of generality.
The gauge freedom present in the conformal field equations can easily be determined. The freedom to choose the coordinates amounts to four scalar functions while the linear reference frame, which we take to be orthogonal, can be specified by a Lorentz rotation, which amounts to six free functions. Finally, the choice of a conformal factor contributes another free function. Altogether, there are eleven functions that can be chosen at will.
Once the geometric equations have been transformed into equations for components, the next step is to extract the reduced system. These are equations for the components of the geometric quantities defined above as well as for gauge-dependent quantities: the components of the frame with respect to the coordinate basis, the components of the connection with respect to the given frame, and the conformal factor.
There are several well-known choices for coordinates (harmonic, Gauß, Bondi, etc.), as well as for frames (Fermi-Walker transport, Newman-Penrose, etc.). These are usually “hard-wired” into the equations and one has no further control on the properties of the gauge. Gauß coordinates for instance have the tendency to become singular when the geodesic congruence that is used for their definition starts to self-intersect. Similarly, Bondi coordinates are attached to null-hypersurfaces, which have the tendency to self-intersect, thus destroying the coordinate system. In the context of existence proofs and the numerical evolution of the equations, it is of considerable interest to have additional flexibility in order to prevent the coordinates or the frame from becoming singular. The goal is to “fix the gauge” in as flexible a manner as possible, and to obtain reduced equations that still have useful properties.
A scheme to obtain the reduced equations in
symmetric hyperbolic form while still allowing for arbitrary gauges
has been devised by Friedrich [59] (see
also [66
] for various
examples). The idea is based on the following observation. Cartan’s
structure equations, which express the torsion and curvature
tensors in terms of tetrad and connection coefficients, are
two-form equations: They are skew on two indices, and the
information contained in the equations is not enough to fix the
tetrad and the connection by specifying the torsion and the
curvature. The additional information is provided by fixing a
gauge. Normally, this is achieved by reducing the number of
variables, in this case the number of tetrad components and
connection coefficients. However, one can just as well add
appropriate further equations to have enough equations for all
unknowns. The additional equations should be chosen so that the
ensuing system has “nice” properties.
We illustrate this procedure by a somewhat
trivial example. Consider, in flat space with coordinates , a one-form
which we require to
be closed:
From this equation we can extract three evolution equations, namely
Another possible procedure is to enlarge the
system by adding an equation for the time derivative of . Doing this covariantly implies that we should add
an equation in the form of a divergence
where is an arbitrary function.
This results in the system
In a similar way, one proceeds in the present
case of the conformal field equations. Note, however, that this way
of fixing a gauge is not at all specific to these equations. Since
it depends essentially only on the form of Cartan’s structure
equations it is applicable in all cases where these are part of the
first order system. The Cartan equations can be regarded as
exterior equations for the one-forms dual to a tetrad
and the connection one-forms
. Similar to the system above, the
equations involve only the exterior derivative of the one-forms,
and so we expect that we should add equations in divergence form,
namely
In a given gauge (i.e. coordinates and frame field are specified) the gauge sources can be determined from
In fact, these equations are exactly the same equations as (23Finally, we need to discuss the gauge freedom in
the choice of the conformal factor . In many
discussions of asymptotic structure, the conformal factor is chosen
in such a way that null-infinity is divergence-free, in addition to
the vanishing of its shear, which is a consequence of the
asymptotic vacuum equations. That means that infinitesimal area
elements remain unchanged in size as they are parallelly
transported along the generators of
. Since they also
remain unchanged in form due to the vanishing shear of
, they remain invariant and hence they can be used to
define a unique metric on the space of generators of
. This choice simplifies many calculations on
, still leaving the conformal factor quite arbitrary
away from
. Yet, in numerical applications this
choice of the conformal factor may be too rigid and so one needs a
flexible method for fixing the conformal factor.
It turns out that one can introduce a gauge
source function for the conformal gauge as well. Consider the
change of the scalar curvature under the conformal rescaling ,
: It transforms according to
Reading this transformation law as an equation for
we obtain
Having established that the gauge sources do, in
fact, fix a unique gauge locally, we can now split the system of
conformal field equations into evolution equations and constraints.
The resulting system of equations is exhibited below. The reduction
process is rather straightforward but tedious. It is sketched in
Appendix 6. Here, we only describe it
very briefly. We introduce an arbitrary time-like unit vector field
, which has a priori no relation to the tetrad field
used for framing. We split all the tensorial quantities into the
parts that are parallel and orthogonal to that vector field using
the projector
. The connection
coefficients for the four-dimensional connection
are treated differently. We introduce the covariant
derivatives of the vector field
by
They account for half () of the
four-dimensional connection coefficients. The other half is
captured by defining a covariant derivative
that has the property that it annihilates both
and
and agrees with
when acting on tensors orthogonal to
(see Equations (42
)). Note that we have
not required that
be the time-like member of the frame,
nor have we assumed that it be hypersurface orthogonal. In the
latter case,
is the extrinsic curvature of the
family of hypersurfaces orthogonal to
and hence it is
symmetric. Furthermore, the derivative
agrees with the
Levi-Civita connection of the metric
induced on the
leaves by the metric
.
We write the equations in terms of the derivative
and the “time derivative”
, which is defined in
a way similar to
(see Equation (42
)), because in this
form it is quite easy to see the symmetric hyperbolicity of the
equations.
As they stand, the Equations (93, 94
, 95
, 96
, 97
, 98
, 99
, 100
, 101
, 102
, 103
, 104
, 105
, 106
) form a symmetric
hyperbolic system of evolution equations for the collection of 65
unknowns
This property is present irrespective of the
particular gauge. For any choice of the gauge source functions ,
,
, and
, the system is symmetric hyperbolic. The fact that
the gauge sources appear only in undifferentiated form implies that
one can specify them not only as functions of the space-time
coordinates but also as functions of the unknown fields. In this
way, one can feed information about the current status of the
evolution back into the system in order to influence the future
development.
Other ways of specifying the coordinate gauge,
including the familiar choice of a lapse function and a shift
vector, are not as flexible because then not only do these
functions themselves appear in the equations, but so do their
derivatives. Specifying them as functions of the unknown fields
alters the principal part of the system and, hence, the propagation
properties of the solution. This may not only corrupt the character
of the system but it may also be disastrous for numerical
applications, because an uncontrolled change of the local
propagation speeds implies that the stability of a numerical scheme
can break down due to violation of the CFL condition
(see [46] for a more detailed
discussion of these issues). However, due to the intuitive meaning
of lapse and shift they are used (almost exclusively) in numerical
codes.
There are several other ways to write the
equations. Apart from various possibilities to specify the gauges
that result in different systems with different numbers of
unknowns, one can also set up the equations using spinorial
methods. This was the method of choice in almost all of Friedrich’s
work (see e.g. [63] and also [45
]). The ensuing
system of equations is analogous to those obtained here using the
tetrad formalism. The main advantages of using spinors is the fact
that the reduction process automatically leads to a symmetric
hyperbolic system, that the variables are components of irreducible
spinors which allows for the elimination of redundancies, and that
variables and equations become complex and hence easier to handle.
Another possibility is to ignore the tetrad
formalism altogether (or, more correctly, to choose as a basis for
the tangent spaces the natural coordinate frame). This also results
in a symmetric hyperbolic system of equations (see [66, 94]), in which the
gauge-dependent variables are not the frame components with their
corresponding connection coefficients, but the components of the
spatial metric together with the usual Christoffel symbols and the
extrinsic curvature.
The fact that the reduced equations form a symmetric hyperbolic system leads, via standard theorems, to the existence of smooth solutions that evolve uniquely from suitable smooth data given on an initial surface. We have the
Theorem 2 (Friedrich [59]):
For functions ,
,
,
on
and data given on some
initial surface, let
be the solution of the reduced equations.
If
satisfies the
conformal field equations (16
, 17
, 18
, 19
, 20
, 21
)
on the initial surface, then, in fact, it satisfies them
on the entire domain of dependence of the
initial surface in the space-time defined by
.
The proof of this theorem relies on the existence
of a “subsidiary system” of equations for the zero-quantity (see Equation (15
)), whose vanishing
indicates the validity of the conformal field equations. This
system turns out to be linear, symmetric hyperbolic, and homogeneous. Thus, one has uniqueness of the
solutions so that
vanishes in the domain of dependence of
the initial surface if it vanishes on the surface. Hence, the
conformal field equations hold. It can be shown that solutions
obtained from different gauge source functions are in the same
conformal class, so they lead to the same physical space-time.