In this lecture I will discuss Kerr-de Sitter black holes, which are rotating black holes in a universe with a positive cosmological constant, i.e. they are explicit solutions (in 3+1 dimensions) of Einstein's equations of general relativity. They are parameterized by their mass and angular momentum.
I will discuss the geometry of these black holes, and then talk about the stability question for these black holes in the initial value formulation. Namely, appropriately interpreted, Einstein's equations can be thought of as quasilinear wave equations, and then the question is if perturbations of the initial data produce solutions which are close to, and indeed asymptotic to, a Kerr-de Sitter black hole, typically with a different mass and angular momentum. In this talk, I will emphasize geometric aspects of the stability problem, in particular showing that Kerr-de Sitter black holes with small angular momentum are stable in this sense.[-]

It has been observed by physicists (Isaacson, Burnett, Green-Wald) that metric perturbations of a background solution, which are small amplitude but with high frequency, yield at the limit to a non trivial contribution which corresponds to the presence of an energy impulsion tensor in the equation for the background metric. This non trivial contribution is of due to the nonlinearities in Einstein equations, which involve products of derivatives of the metric. It has been conjectured by Burnett that the only tensors which can be obtained this way are massless Vlasov, and it has been proved by Green and Wald that the limit tensor must be traceless and satisfy the dominant energy condition. The known exemples of this phenomena are constructed under symmetry reductions which involve two Killing fields and lead to an energy impulsion tensor which consists in at most two dust fields propagating in null directions. In this talk, I will explain our construction, under a symmetry reduction involving one Killing field, which leads to an energy impulsion tensor consisting in N dust fields propagating in arbitrary null directions. This is a joint work with Jonathan Luk (Stanford).[-]

I will describe joint work with Dietrich Häfner and Andràs Vasy in which we study the asymptotic behavior of linearized gravitational perturbations of Schwarzschild or slowly rotating Kerr black hole spacetimes. We show that solutions of the linearized Einstein equation decay at an inverse polynomial rate to a stationary solution (given by an infinitesimal variation of the mass and angular momentum of the black hole), plus a pure gauge term. Our proof uses a detailed description of the resolvent of an associated wave equation on symmetric 2-tensors near zero energy.[-]

A complete Riemannian manifold is called asymptotically hyperbolic if its ends are modeled on neighborhoods of infinity in hyperbolic space. There is a notion of mass for this class of manifolds defined as a coordinate invariant computed in a fixed asymptotically hyperbolic end and measuring the leading order deviation of the geometry from the background hyperbolic metric in the end. Asymptotically hyperbolic manifolds arize naturally in mathematical general relativity, in particular, as slices of asymptotically Minkowski spacetimes, in which case the mass of the slice coincides with the Bondi mass of the spacetime. Having reviewed these and related concepts, we will discuss our proof of the positive mass theorem in the asymptotically hyperbolic setting, which relies on the original ideas of Schoen and Yau and involves a blow-up analysis of the so-called Jang equation, a geometric PDE of mean curvature type.[-]