Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 September 2013
The stability of static solutions of the spherically symmetric, asymptotically flat Einstein–Vlasov system is studied using a Hamiltonian approach based on energy-Casimir functionals. The main results are a coercivity estimate for the quadratic part of the expansion of the natural energy-Casimir functional about an isotropic steady state, and the linear stability of such steady states. The coercivity bound shows in a quantified way that this quadratic part is positive definite on a class of linearly dynamically accessible perturbations, provided the particle distribution of the steady state is a strictly decreasing function of the particle energy and provided the steady state is not too relativistic. In contrast to the stability theory for isotropic steady states of the gravitational Vlasov-Poisson system the monotonicity of the particle distribution alone does not determine the stability character of the state, a fact which was observed by Ze'ldovitch et al. in the 1960's. The result in an essential way exploits the non-linear structure of the Einstein equations satisfied by the steady state and is not just a perturbation result of the analogous coercivity bounds for the Newtonian case. It should be an essential step in a fully non-linear stability analysis for the Einstein–Vlasov system.