In the static, spherically symmetric case, the problem can be formulated as follows. Let the spacetime metric have the form
where
,
,
. As before, asymptotic flatness is expressed by the boundary
conditions
and a regular centre requires
Following the notation in Section 2.1, the time-independent Einstein-Vlasov system reads
The matter quantities are defined as before: The quantitiesare conserved along characteristics.
is the particle energy and
is the angular momentum squared. If we let
for some function
, the Vlasov equation is automatically satisfied. The form of
is usually restricted to
In passing, we mention that for the
Vlasov-Poisson system it has been shown
[15]
that every static spherically symmetric solution must have the
form
. This is referred to as Jeans’ theorem. It was an open question
for some time to decide whether or not this was also true for the
Einstein-Vlasov system. This was settled in 1999 by
Schaeffer
[107], who found solutions that do not have this particular form
globally on phase space, and consequently, Jeans’ theorem is not
valid in the relativistic case. However, almost all results in
this field rest on this ansatz. By inserting the ansatz for
in the matter quantities
and
, a nonlinear system for
and
is obtained, in which
Existence of solutions to this system was first
proved in the case of isotropic pressure in
[90]
and then extended to the general case in
[81
]
. The main problem is then to show that the resulting solutions
have finite (ADM) mass and compact support. This is accomplished
in
[90
]
for a polytropic ansatz with isotropic pressure and in
[81
]
for a polytropic ansatz with possible anisotropic pressure. They
use a perturbation argument based on the fact that the
Vlasov-Poisson system is the limit of the Einstein-Vlasov system
as the speed of light tends to infinity
[89]
. Two types of solutions are constructed, those with a regular
centre
[90, 81
], and those with a Schwarzschild singularity in the centre
[81]
. In
[91
]
Rendall and Rein go beyond the polytropic ansatz and assume that
satisfies
where
,
,
,
. They show that this assumption is sufficient for obtaining
steady states with finite mass and compact support. The result is
obtained in a more direct way and is not based on the
perturbation argument mentioned above. Their method is inspired
by a work on stellar models by Makino
[67], in which he considers steady states of the Euler-Einstein
system. In
[91]
there is also an interesting discussion about steady states that
appear in the astrophysics literature. They show that their
result applies to most of these steady states, which proves that
they have the desirable property of finite mass and compact
support.
All solutions described so far have the
property that the support of
contains a ball about the centre. In
[84]
Rein shows that there exist steady states whose support is a
finite, spherically symmetric shell, so that they have a vacuum
region in the centre.
At present, there are almost no known results concerning the stability properties of the steady states to the Einstein-Vlasov system. In the Vlasov-Poisson case, however, the nonlinear stability of stationary solutions has been investigated by Guo and Rein [51] using the energy-Casimir method. In the Einstein-Vlasov case, Wolansky [121] has applied the energy-Casimir method and obtained some insights but the theory in this case is much less developed than in the Vlasov-Poisson case and the stability problem is essentially open.
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