Dynamical black holes with prescribed masses in spherical symmetry

Abstract: We review our recent work on a construction of spherically symmetric global solutions to the Einstein--scalar field system with large bounded variation norms and large Bondi masses. We show that similar ideas, together with Christodoulou's short pulse method, allow us to prove the following result: Given $M_i \geq M_f>0$ and $\epsilon>0$, there exists a spherically symmetric (black hole) solution to the Einstein--scalar field system such that up to an error of size $\epsilon$, the initial Bondi mass is $M_i$ and the final Bondi mass is $M_f$. Moreover, if one assumes a continuity property of the final Bondi mass (which in principle follows from known techniques in the literature), then for $M_i>M_f>0$, the above result holds without an $\epsilon$-error.