We construct asymptotic foliations of asymptotically Schwarzschildean lightcones by surfaces of constant spacetime mean curvature (STCMC). Our construction is motivated by the approach of Huisken-Yau for the Riemannian setting in employing a geometric flow. We prove that initial data within a sufficient a-priori class converges exponentially to an STCMC surface under area preserving null mean curvature flow. Further, we show that the resulting STCMC surfaces form an asymptotic foliation that is unique within the a-priori class.

We define a geometric quantity for asymptotically hyperbolic manifolds, which we call the volume-renormalized mass. It is essentially a linear combination of the ADM mass surface integral and a renormalization of the volume. We show that the volume-renormalized mass is well-defined and diffeomorphism invariant under weaker fall-off conditions than required to ensure that the renormalized volume and the ADM mass surface integral are well-defined separately. We prove several positivity results for the volume-renormalized mass. We also use it to define a renormalized Einstein–Hilbert action and a renormalized expander entropy which is nondecreasing under the Ricci flow. Further, we show that local maximizers of the entropy are local minimizers of the volume-renormalized Uaeusmass.

We prove dynamical stability and instability theorems for Poincaré–Einstein metrics under the Ricci flow. Our key tool is a variant of the expander entropy for asymptotically hyperbolic manifolds, which Dahl, McCormick and the first author established in a recent article. It allows us to characterize stability and instability in terms of a local positive mass theorem and in terms of volume comparison for nearby metrics.

Hawking’s local rigidity theorem, proven in the smooth setting by Alexakis-Ionescu-Klainerman, says that the event horizon of any stationary non-extremal black hole is a non-degenerate Killing horizon. In this paper, we prove that the full asymptotic expansion of any smooth vacuum metric at a non-degenerate Killing horizon is determined by the geometry of the horizon. This gives a new perspective on the black hole uniqueness conjecture. In spacetime dimension 4, we also prove an existence theorem: Given any non-degenerate horizon geometry, Einstein’s vacuum equations can be solved to infinite order at the horizon in a unique way (up to isometry). The latter is a gauge invariant version of Moncrief’s classical existence result, without any restriction on the topology of the horizon. In the real analytic setting, the asymptotic expansion is shown to converge and we get well-posedness of this characteristic Cauchy problem.

An Einstein manifold is called scalar curvature rigid if there are no compactly supported volume-preserving deformations of the metric which increase the scalar curvature. We give various characterizations of scalar curvature rigidity for open Einstein manifolds as well as for closed Einstein manifolds. As an application, we construct mass-decreasing deformations of the Riemannian Schwarzschild metric and the Taub–Bolt metric.

We compute the indicial roots of the Lichnerowicz Laplacian on Ricci-flat cones and give a detailed description of the corresponding radially homogeneous tensor fields in its kernel. For a Ricci-flat conifold (M, g) which may have asymptotically conical as well as conically singular ends, we compute at each end a lower bound for the order with which the metric converges to the tangent cone. As a special subcase of our result, we show that any Ricci-flat ALE manifold (Mn,g) is of order n and thereby close a small gap in a paper by Cheeger and Tia.

We consider a Ricci de Turck flow of spaces with isolated conical singularities, which preserves the conical structure along the flow. We establish that a given initial regularity of Ricci curvature is preserved along the flow. Moreover under additional assumptions, positivity of scalar curvature is preserved under such a flow, mirroring the standard property of Ricci flow on compact manifolds. The analytic difficulty is the a priori low regularity of scalar curvature at the conical tip along the flow, so that the maximum principle does not apply. We view this work as a first step toward studying positivity of the curvature operator along the singular Ricci flow.