The Wave Equation in a General Spherically Symmetric Black Hole Geometry

Abstract: We consider the Cauchy problem for the wave equation in a general class of spherically symmetric black hole geometries. Under certain mild conditions on the far-field decay and the singularity, we show that there is a unique globally smooth solution to the Cauchy problem for the wave equation with data compactly supported away from the horizon that is compactly supported for all times and \emph{decays in $L^{\infty}_{\text{loc}}$ as $t$ tends to infinity}. We obtain as a corollary that in the geometry of black hole solutions of the SU(2) Einstein/Yang-Mills equations, solutions to the wave equation with compactly supported initial data decay as $t$ goes to infinity.