Boundedness and decay of scalar waves at the Cauchy horizon of the Kerr spacetime

Abstract

Adapting and extending the techniques developed in recent work with Vasy for the study of the Cauchy horizon of cosmological spacetimes, we obtain boundedness, regularity and decay of linear scalar waves on subextremal Reissner–Nordström and (slowly rotating) Kerr spacetimes, without any symmetry assumptions; in particular, we provide simple microlocal and scattering theoretic proofs of analogous results by Franzen. We show polynomial decay of linear waves relative to a Sobolev space of order slightly above 1/2. This complements the generic $H_{\mathrm{loc}}^1$ blow-up result of Luk and Oh.