Stability, Instability, and Hair

Abstract

Abstract This chapter is concerned with the global non-linear stability of de Sitter spacetime and with the cosmic no-hair conjecture (according to which de Sitter spacetime is a powerful dynamical attractor when a term with a positive cosmological constant is included in the Einstein equation). By way of context, it includes some background about the notion of global non-linear stability. And by way of contrast it also considers the global non-linear instability of the Einstein static universe, the global non-linear stability of Minkowski spacetime and the global non-linear (in)stability of anti-de Sitter spacetime.