Formation of Trapped Surfaces from Spacelike Initial Data

We make use of the free data formalism developed in \cite{CK25,CK26} to provide a direct construction of short-pulse type Cauchy data. The construction of the spacelike short-pulse follows from the local existence result established in \cite{CK26}. The forward integration construction in \cite{CK26} allows us to show that such data can be extended to a set of asymptotically flat Cauchy data. This greatly extends the result of Li–Yu \cite{LiYu}.