A New Gauge for Gravitational Perturbations of Kerr Spacetimes II: The Linear Stability of Schwarzschild Revisited

Abstract We present a new proof of linear stability of the Schwarzschild solution to gravitational perturbations. Our approach employs the system of linearised gravity in the new geometric gauge of Benomio (A new gauge for gravitational perturbations of Kerr spacetimes I: the linearised theory, 2022, https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.00602 ), specialised to the $$|a|=0$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>|</mml:mo> <mml:mi>a</mml:mi> <mml:mo>|</mml:mo> <mml:mo>=</mml:mo> <mml:mn>0</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> case. The proof fundamentally relies on the novel structure of the transport equations in the system. Indeed, while exploiting the well-known decoupling of two gauge invariant linearised quantities into spin $$\pm 2$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>±</mml:mo> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> Teukolsky equations, we make enhanced use of the red-shifted transport equations and their stabilising properties to control the gauge dependent part of the system. As a result, an initial-data gauge normalisation suffices to establish both orbital and asymptotic stability for all the linearised quantities in the system. The absence of future gauge normalisations is a novel element in the linear stability analysis of black hole spacetimes in geometric gauges governed by transport equations. In particular, our approach simplifies the proof of Dafermos et al. (Acta Math 222:1–214, 2019), which requires a future normalised (double-null) gauge to establish asymptotic stability for the full system.