Europe/Lisbon
Online

Melanie Graf
Melanie Graf, University of Tübingen

Singularity theorems in low regularity

The singularity theorems of R. Penrose and S. Hawking from the 1960s show that a spacetime satisfying certain physically reasonable curvature and causality conditions cannot be causal geodesically complete. Despite their great success these classical theorems still have some drawbacks, one of them being that they require smoothness of the metric while in many physical models the metric is less regular. In my talk I will present work on singularity theorems based on distributional energy conditions for metrics that are merely continuously differentiable – a regularity where one still has existence but not uniqueness for solutions of the geodesic equation. We will see that an approximation-based approach to the low-regularity issue is closely linked to establishing singularity theorems under weakened energy conditions and while the improvements necessary are still entirely straightforward in the present case, attempting to lower the regularity further would require some new methods.