On uniform decay of the Maxwell fields on black hole space-times

Abstract

In this paper, we study the Maxwell equations in the domain of outer-communication of the Schwarzschild black hole. We prove that if the middle components of the non-stationary solutions of the Maxwell equations verify a Morawetz-type estimate supported on a compact region in space around the trapped surface, then the components of the Maxwell fields decay uniformly in the entire exterior of the Schwarzschild black hole, including the event horizon. This is shown by making only use of Sobolev inequalities combined with energy estimates using the Maxwell equations directly. The proof does not pass through the scalar wave equation on the Schwarzschild black hole, does not need to decouple the middle components for the Maxwell fields, and would be in particular useful for the non-abelian case of the Yang–Mills equations where the decoupling of the middle components cannot occur. In fact, the estimates for the hereby argument are still valid for the Yang–Mills fields except for the Lie derivatives of the fields that are involved in the proof.