Lectures on black holes and linear waves

These lecture notes, based on a course given at the Zurich Clay Summer School (June 23-July 18, 2008), review our current mathematical understanding of the global behaviour of waves on black hole exterior backgrounds. Interest in this problem stems from its relationship to the non-linear stability of the black hole spacetimes themselves as solutions to the Einstein equations, one of the central open problems of general relativity. After an introductory discussion of the Schwarzschild geometry and the black hole concept, the classical theorem of Kay and Wald on the boundedness of scalar waves on the exterior region of Schwarzschild is reviewed. The original proof is presented, followed by a new more robust proof of a stronger boundedness statement. The problem of decay of scalar waves on Schwarzschild is then addressed, and a theorem proving quantitative decay is stated and its proof sketched. This decay statement is carefully contrasted with the type of statements derived heuristically in the physics literature for the asymptotic tails of individual spherical harmonics. Following this, our recent proof of the boundedness of solutions to the wave equation on axisymmetric stationary backgrounds (including slowly-rotating Kerr and Kerr-Newman) is reviewed and a new decay result for slowly-rotating Kerr spacetimes is stated and proved. This last result was announced at the summer school and appears in print here for the first time. A discussion of the analogue of these problems for spacetimes with a positive cosmological constant follows. Finally, a general framework is given for capturing the red-shift effect for non-extremal black holes. This unifies and extends some of the analysis of the previous sections. The notes end with a collection of open problems.