3/5/2007

Jan Metzger
Stanford University

Stable and outermost marginally trapped surfaces

Marginally trapped surfaces are the quasi-local analogy to black holes in general relativity and thus have important applications in mathematical and numerical relativity. In this talk I will present curvature estimates for stable marginally outer trapped surfaces and an area estimate for outermost marginally outer trapped surfaces. Important tools are well known techniques for stable minimal surfaces and a theorem by Schoen, which roughly speaking ensures the existence of a marginally trapped surface between a strictly trapped and a strictly untrapped one.