Stability and instability of the Einstein-Lichnerowicz constraint system

Abstract: We investigate the relevance of the conformal method by investigating stability issues for the Einstein-Lichnerowicz conformal constraint system in a nonlinear scalar-field setting. We prove the stability of the system with respect to arbitrary perturbations of generic focusing physics data on closed locally conformally flat manifolds, in any dimension. We also show that our stability result is sharp by constructing explicit instability examples when its assumptions are not satisfied. Our results apply to a more general class of constraint-like systems.