Linear and nonlinear late-time tails on dynamical black hole spacetimes via time integrals

Abstract: We prove the global leading-order late-time asymptotic behaviour of solutions to inhomogeneous wave equations on dynamical black hole exterior backgrounds that settle down to Schwarzschild backgrounds with arbitrarily small decay rates. In particular, we show that for non-spherically symmetric solutions arising from compactly supported initial data, the late-time decay deviates from Price's law -- governing the decay for stationary black hole backgrounds -- by exhibiting slower time decay by exactly one additional power. Our proof is based around the observation that the emergence of late-time "tails", featuring inverse-polynomial decay in time, is intimately connected to conformal irregularity properties in space (towards future null infinity) of time integrals of the solutions. This relationship is exploited through a purely physical-space approach based around energy estimates, in which the dynamical wave operator is treated as a Schwarzschild wave operator with an inhomogeneous term. Going from almost-sharp decay to global asymptotics is achieved by exploiting this relation for the difference between the solution and a carefully chosen global tail function. We further apply our method to several examples of nonlinear wave equations and comment on its robustness to more general settings, such as dynamical spacetimes converging to sub-extremal Kerr spacetimes and higher-dimensional wave operators with even or odd spacetime dimensions.