Peter Hintz (ETH Zurich) will talk in the differential geometry seminar, at 2pm on 16th December, in the Salle des Profs (9th floor building NO). Peter’s title is “Gluing small black holes along timelike geodesics” and his abstract is below.
Suppose we are given a solution (M,g) of the Einstein vacuum equations — that is, g is Ricci-flat. Given a timelike geodesic in M, I will explain how to construct a solution g_\epsilon of the Einstein vacuum equations which is approximately equal to g far from the geodesic but near any point along the geodesic approximately equal to the metric of a Kerr black hole with mass \epsilon. As an application, we can construct spacetimes which describe the merger of a very light black hole with a unit mass black hole, followed by the relaxation of the resulting single black hole to its equilibrium state.