Black hole gluing in de Sitter space

Abstract: We construct dynamical many-black-hole spacetimes with well-controlled asymptotic behavior as solutions of the Einstein vacuum equation with positive cosmological constant. We accomplish this by gluing Schwarzschild-de Sitter or Kerr-de Sitter black hole metrics into neighborhoods of points on the future conformal boundary of de Sitter space, under certain balance conditions on the black hole parameters. We give a self-contained treatment of solving the Einstein equation directly for the metric, given the scattering data we encounter at the future conformal boundary. The main step in the construction is the solution of a linear divergence equation for trace-free symmetric 2-tensors; this is closely related to Friedrich's analysis of scattering problems for the Einstein equation on asymptotically simple spacetimes.