Horst Knörrer (ETH)

Construction of oscillatory singular homogenuous space times

Abstract:
The vacuum Einstein equations for Bianchi space times (that is space times that can be foliated into three dimensional space like slices that are all homogenuous spaces) reduce to a system of ordinary differential equations. The conjectures of Belinskii, Khalatnikov and Lifshitz predict that for almost all initial data the solutions of these differential equation behave like trajectories of a billiard in a Farey triangle in the hyperbolic plane, that is, a triangle whose three vertices are ideal points. In joint work with M.Reiterer and E.Trubowitz we show that, for a set of initial data that has positive measure, this is indeed the case. We use ideas inspired by scattering theory for approximations of the system. The fact that billiard in a Farey triangle is chaotic leads us to small divisor problems similiar to those of KAM theory in Hamiltonian dynamics.