5.5 Existence of axisymmetric static solutions
As we have seen above, a broad variety of static solutions of the Einstein–Vlasov system has been
established, all of which share the restriction that they are spherically symmetric. The recent
investigation [18
] removes this restriction and proves the existence of static solutions of the Einstein–Vlasov
system, which are axially symmetric but not spherically symmetric. From the applications point of view this
symmetry assumption is more “realistic” than spherical symmetry, and from the mathematics point of view
the complexity of the Einstein field equations increases drastically if one gives up spherical symmetry.
Before discussing this result, let us mention that similar results have been obtained for two other matter
models. In the case of a perfect fluid, Heilig showed the existence of axisymmetric stationary
solutions in [92
]. These solutions have non-zero angular momentum since static solutions are
necessarily spherically symmetric. In this respect the situation for elastic matter is more similar to
Vlasov matter. The existence of static axisymmetric solutions of elastic matter, which are not
spherically symmetric, was proven in [1
]. Stationary solutions with rotation were then established
in [2
].
Let us now briefly discuss the method of proof in [18
], which relies on an application of the implicit
function theorem. Also, the proofs in [92, 1, 2] make use of the implicit function theorem, but apart from
this fact the methods are quite different.
The set-up of the problem in [18
] follows the work of Bardeen [31], where the metric is written in the
form
for functions
depending on
and
, where
and
. The
Killing vector fields
and
correspond to the stationarity and axial symmetry of the
spacetime. Solutions are obtained by perturbing off spherically symmetric steady states of the
Vlasov–Poisson system via the implicit function theorem and the reason for writing
in the metric, instead of
, is that
converges to the Newtonian potential
of the
steady state in the limit
. Asymptotic flatness is expressed by the boundary conditions
In addition the solutions are required to be locally flat at the axis of symmetry, which implies the condition
Let us now recall from Section 5.1 the strategy to construct static solutions by using an ansatz of the form
where
and
are conserved quantities along characteristics. Due to the symmetries of the metric (68)
the following quantities are constant along geodesics:
Here
are the canonical momenta.
can be thought of as a local or particle energy and
is the
angular momentum of a particle with respect to the axis of symmetry. For a sufficiently regular
the
ansatz function
satisfies the Vlasov equation and upon insertion of this ansatz into the definition of the
energy momentum tensor (32) the latter becomes a functional
of the unknown metric
functions
. It then remains to solve the Einstein equations with this energy momentum tensor as
right-hand side. The Newtonian limit of the Einstein–Vlasov system is the Vlasov–Poisson system and the
strategy in [18
] is to perturb off spherically symmetric steady states of the Vlasov–Poisson system via the
implicit function theorem to obtain axisymmetric solutions. Indeed, the main result of [18
]
specifies conditions on the ansatz function
such that a two parameter (
and
) family of
axially-symmetric solutions of the Einstein–Vlasov system passes through the corresponding
spherically symmetric, Newtonian steady state, whose ansatz function we denote by
. The
parameter
turns on general relativity and the parameter
turns on the dependence on
. Since
is not invariant under arbitrary rotations about the origin the solution is not
spherically symmetric if
depends on
. It should also be mentioned that although
is
a priori small, which means that
is large, the scaling symmetry of the Einstein–Vlasov
system can be used to obtain solutions corresponding to the physically correct value of
.
The most striking condition on the ansatz function
, or rather on the ansatz function
of the corresponding Vlasov–Poisson system, needed to carry out the proof is that it must
satisfy
where
An important argument in the proof is indeed to justify that there are steady states of the Vlasov–Poisson
system satisfying this condition.
It is of course desirable to extend the result in [18
] to stationary solutions with rotation. Moreover, the
deviation from spherically symmetry of the solutions in [18] is small and an interesting open question is
the existence of disk-like models of galaxies. In the Vlasov–Poisson case this has been shown
in [74].