A proof of Price's Law on Schwarzschild black hole manifolds for all angular momenta

Price's Law states that linear perturbations of a Schwarzschild black hole fall off as t(-2l-3) for t -> infinity provided the initial data decay sufficiently fast at spatial infinity. Moreover, if the perturbations are initially static (i.e., their time derivative is zero), then the decay is predicted to be t(-2l-4). We give a proof of t(-2l-2) decay for general data in the form of weighted L-1 to L-infinity bounds for solutions of the Regge-Wheeler equation. For initially static perturbations we obtain t(-2l-3). The proof is based on an integral representation of the solution which follows from self-adjoint spectral theory. We apply two different perturbative arguments in order to construct the corresponding spectral measure and the decay bounds are obtained by appropriate oscillatory integral estimates. (c) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.