The Asymptotic Expansion of the Spacetime Metric at the Event Horizon

Abstract 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.