Rigidity of Stable Marginally Outer Trapped Surfaces in Initial Data Sets

In this article, we investigate the restrictions imposed by the dominant energy condition (DEC) on the topology and conformal type of possibly non-compact marginally outer trapped surfaces (thus extending Hawking’s classical theorem on the topology of black holes). We first prove that an unbounded, stable marginally outer trapped surface in an initial data set (M, g, k) obeying the dominant energy condition is conformally diffeomorphic to either the plane \({\mathbb{C}}\) or to the cylinder \({\mathbb{A}}\) and in the latter case infinitesimal rigidity holds. As a corollary, when the DEC holds strictly, this rules out the existence of trapped regions with cylindrical boundary. In the second part of the article, we restrict our attention to asymptotically flat data (M, g, k) and show that, in that setting, the existence of an unbounded, stable marginally outer trapped surface essentially never occurs unless in a very specific case, since it would force an isometric embedding of (M, g, k) into the Minkowski spacetime as a space-like slice.