Introduction

This introductory chapter provides a quick review of the basic concepts of general relativity relevant to this work. The main object of Albert Einstein's general relativity is the spacetime. The nonlinear stability of the Kerr family is one of the most pressing issues in mathematical general relativity today. Roughly, the problem is to show that all spacetime developments of initial data sets, sufficiently close to the initial data set of a Kerr spacetime, behave in the large like a (typically another) Kerr solution. This is not only a deep mathematical question but one with serious astrophysical implications. Indeed, if the Kerr family would be unstable under perturbations, black holes would be nothing more than mathematical artifacts. The goal of this book is to prove the nonlinear stability of the Schwarzschild spacetime under axially symmetric polarized perturbations, namely, solutions of the Einstein vacuum equations for asymptotically flat 1 + 3 dimensional Lorentzian metrics which admit a hypersurface orthogonal spacelike Killing vectorfield Z with closed orbits.