On the geodesic incompleteness of spacetimes containing marginally outer trapped surfaces

Abstract: In a paper, Eichmair, Galloway and Pollack have proved a Gannon-Lee-type singularity theorem based on the existence of marginally outer trapped surfaces (MOTS) on noncompact initial data sets for globally hyperbolic spacetimes. This result requires that the MOTS be generic in a suitable sense. In the same spirit, this author has proven some variants of that result which hold for weaker causal conditions on spacetime, but which concern (generic) marginally trapped surfaces (MTS) rather than MOTS, i.e., most of the results need a condition on the convergence of the ingoing family of normal null geodesics as well. However, much of the more recent literature has focused on MOTS rather than MTS as quasi-local substitutes for the description of black holes, as they are arguably more natural and easier to handle in a number of situations. It is therefore pertinent to ask to what extent one can deduce the existence of singularities in the presence of MOTS alone. In this note, we address this issue and show that singularities still arise in the presence of generic MOTS under weaker causal conditions (specifically, for causally simple spacetimes). Moreover, provided we assume that the MOTS is the boundary of a compact spatial region, a Penrose-Hawking-type singularity theorem can be established for chronological spacetimes containing generic MOTS.