Improvability of the dominant energy scalar and Bartnik’s stationary conjecture

In this talk, we will introduce the concept of improvabilty of the dominant energy scalar and discuss strong consequences of non-improvability. We employ new, large families of deformations of the modified Einstein constraint operator and show that, generically, their adjoint linearizations are either injective, or else one can prove that kernel elements satisfy a “null-vector equation”. Combined with a conformal argument, we make significant progress toward Bartnik’s stationary conjecture. More specifically, we prove that a Bartnik minimizing initial data set can be developed into a spacetime that both satisfies the dominant energy condition and carries a global Killing field. We also show that this spacetime is vacuum near spatial infinity. This talk is based on the joint work with Dan Lee.