Progress towards the BKL Proposal

Abstract: Around 50 years ago, physicists Belinski, Khalatnikov and Lifshitz provided heuristics describing the behaviour of near-singularity solutions to the Einstein equations as spacelike, local and oscillatory. Vaguely speaking, they suggest that dynamics corresponding to different spatial points on the singularity decouple and resemble a chaotic cascade of so-called “Kasner epochs”. In this talk, we present a mathematical formulation of this “BKL Conjecture” and progress towards the conjecture in the case of Gowdy symmetric spacetimes.

general relativity and quantum cosmologymathematical physicsanalysis of PDEsdifferential geometry

Audience: researchers in the topic

JoMaReC - Joint Online Mathematical Relativity Colloquium

Series comments: This monthly online colloquium is meant to be accessible to and informative for mathematicians and mathematical physicists with a background in General Relativity, widely interpreted to include Lorentzian Geometry, and Geometric Analysis of various Partial Differential Equations related to General Relativity.

It is aimed to present motivation and applications of particular results and/or introduce specific subfields, while refraining from too much technicalities.