Zoe Wyatt (University of Edinburgh)
A key question in general relativity is whether solutions to the Einstein equations, viewed as an initial value problem, are stable to small perturbations of the initial data. For example, previous results have shown that the Milne spacetime, which represents an expanding universe emanating from a big bang singularity with a linear scale factor, is a stable solution to the Einstein equations. With such a slow expansion rate, particularly compared to related isotropically expanding models (such as the exponentially expanding de Sitter spacetime observed in our universe), there are interesting questions one can ask about stability of this spacetime. Previous results have shown that the Milne model is a stable solution to the vacuum Einstein, Einstein-Klein-Gordon and Einstein-Vlasov systems. Motivated by techniques from the last result, I will present a new proof of the stability of the Milne model to the Einstein-Klein-Gordon system and compare our method to a recent result of J. Wang. This is joint work with D. Fajman.
