Events

Date: 27 October 2026   Time: 14:00 - 15:30     

Location: MB503

NOTE: Pre talk intro for non experts starts at 2pm, with seminar starting at 2.30pm

Title:
Shock formation in decelerated spacetimes

Abstract:

In cosmological models the matter content of the universe is assumed to be a compressible fluid. Such fluids are prone to the formation of so-called shock singularities, meaning that, at a finite time, the fluid gradient blows up, while the fluid quantities themselves stay bounded. By contrast, rapidly expanding spacetimes facilitate stabilization of any fluid contained inside. This dichotomy raises the question: What amount of expansion is sufficient to prevent shocks forming for sufficiently small data? At the beginning of this talk, we will discuss the preliminaries of relativistic fluids as an initial value problem. Afterwards, I will present new results in the regime of decelerated expansion, which seek to answer this central question. This is joint work with Todd Oliynyk.