J. Guven et No. Murchadha, GEOMETRIC BOUNDS IN SPHERICALLY SYMMETRICAL GENERAL-RELATIVITY, Physical review. D. Particles and fields, 56(12), 1997, pp. 7650-7657
We exploit an arbitrary extrinsic time foliation of spacetime to solve
the constraints in spherically symmetric general relativity. Among su
ch foliations there is a one parameter family, linear and homogeneous
in the extrinsic curvature, which permit the momentum constraint to be
solved exactly. This family includes, as special cases, the extrinsic
time gauges that have been exploited in the past. These foliations ha
ve the property that the extrinsic curvature is spacelike with respect
to the the spherically symmetric superspace metric. What is remarkabl
e is that the linearity can be relaxed at no essential extra cost whic
h permits us to isolate a large nonpathological dense subset of all ex
trinsic time foliations. We now identify properties of solutions which
are independent of the particular foliation within this subset. When
the geometry is regular, we can place spatially invariant numerical bo
unds on the values of both the spatial and the temporal gradients of t
he scalar areal radius R. These bounds are entirely independent of the
particular gauge and of the magnitude of the sources. When singularit
ies occur, we demonstrate that the geometry behaves in a universal way
in the neighborhood of the singularity. These results can be exploite
d to develop necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of
both apparent horizons and singularities in the initial data which do
not depend sensitively on the foliation. [S0556-2821(97)05224-7].