The evolution of marginally stable MOTS in spherically symmetric spacetimes

Abstract

The main objective of this thesis is to study the time evolutionary behaviour of a dynamical black hole horizon characterized by a marginally outer trapped tube (MOTT), a quasi-local model of a black hole horizon defined as a 3-dimensional hypersurface foliated by marginally outer trapped surfaces (MOTS). Motivated by numerical simulations of a binary black hole merger which predict that during the time evolution of the system a MOTT will suddenly appear or disappear and exhibit non-smooth evolutionary behaviour, we work in a spherically symmetric setting and build on established results about the existence of MOTTs based on a stability criteria and derive a local geometric condition which will allow us to distinguish the type of evolution and identify MOTTs with the same behaviour as the numerical model.