Mass-Centered GCM Framework in Perturbations of Kerr(-Newman)

Abstract: The nonlinear stability problem for black hole solutions of the Einstein equations critically depends on choosing an appropriate geometric gauge. In the vacuum setting, the use of Generally Covariant Modulated (GCM) spheres and hypersurfaces has played a central role in the proof of stability for slowly rotating Kerr spacetime. In this work, we develop an alternative GCM framework, that we call mass-centered, designed to overcome the breakdown of the standard GCM construction in the charged case, where electromagnetic-gravitational coupling destroys the exceptional behavior of the $\ell=1$ mode of the center-of-mass quantity used in the vacuum analysis. This construction is aimed at the nonlinear stability of Reissner-Nordstr\"om and Kerr-Newman spacetimes. Our approach replaces transport-based control of the center-of-mass quantity with a sphere-wise vanishing condition on a renormalized $\ell=1$ mode, yielding mass-centered GCM hypersurfaces with modified gauge constraints. The resulting elliptic-transport system remains determined once an $\ell=1$ basis is fixed via effective uniformization and provides an alternative construction in vacuum in the uncharged limit.