The nonlinear stability of n+1 dimensional FLRW spacetimes

Abstract: We prove nonlinear Lyapunov stability of a family of `$n+1$'-dimensional cosmological models of general relativity locally isometric to the Friedman Lema^itre Robertson Walker (FLRW) spacetimes including a positive cosmological constant. In particular, we show that the perturbed solutions to the Einstein-Euler field equations around a class of spatially compact FLRW metrics (for which the spatial slices are compact negative Einstein spaces in general and hyperbolic for the physically relevant $n=3$ case) arising from regular Cauchy data remain uniformly bounded and decay to a family of metrics with constant negative spatial scalar curvature. To accomplish this result, we employ an energy method for the coupled Einstein-Euler field equations in constant mean extrinsic curvature spatial harmonic gauge (CMCSH). In order to handle Euler's equations, we construct energy from a current that is similar to the one derived by Christodoulou \cite{christodoulou} (and which coincides with Christodoulou's current on the Minkowski space) and show that this energy controls the desired norm of the fluid degrees of freedom. The use of a fluid energy current together with the CMCSH gauge condition casts the Einstein-Euler field equations into a coupled elliptic-hyperbolic system. Utilizing the estimates derived from the elliptic equations, we first show that the gravity-fluid energy functional remains uniformly bounded in the expanding direction. Using this uniform boundedness property, we later obtain sharp decay estimates if a positive cosmological constant $\Lambda$ is included, which suggests that the accelerated expansion of the physical universe that is induced by the positive cosmological constant is sufficient to control the non-linearities in the case of small data. A few physical consequences of this stability result are discussed.