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We prove the nonlinear stability of the Schwarzschild spacetime under axially symmetric polarized perturbations, i.e. solutions of the Einstein vacuum equations for asymptotically flat $1+3$ dimensional Lorentzian metrics which admit a hypersurface orthogonal spacelike Killing vectorfield with closed orbits. While building on the remarkable advances made in the last 15 years on establishing quantitative linear stability, the paper introduces a series of new ideas among which we emphasize the \textit{general covariant modulation} (GCM) procedure which allows us to construct, dynamically, the center of mass frame of the final state. The mass of the final state itself is tracked using the well known Hawking mass relative to a well adapted foliation itself connected to the center of mass frame. Our work here is the first to prove the nonlinear stability of Schwarzschild in a restricted class of nontrivial perturbations. To a large extent, the restriction to this class of perturbations is only needed to ensure that the final state of evolution is another Schwarzschild space. We are thus confident that our procedure may apply in a more general setting. 

We derive the asymptotic properties of the mMKG system (Maxwell coupled with a massive Klein-Gordon scalar field) in the exterior of the domain of influence of a compact set. This complements the previous well-known results, restricted to compactly supported initial conditions, based on the so-called hyperboloidal method. That method takes advantage of the commutation properties of the Maxwell and Klein-Gordon equations with the generators of the Poincaré group to resolve the difficulties caused by the fact that they have, separately, different asymptotic properties. Though the hyperboloidal method is very robust and applies well to other related systems, it has the well-known drawback of requiring compactly supported data. In this paper we remove this limitation based on a further extension of the vector field method adapted to the exterior region. Our method applies, in particular, to nontrivial charges. The full problem can then be treated by patching together the new estimates in the exterior with the hyperboloidal ones in the interior. This purely physical space approach introduced here maintains the robust properties of the old method and can thus be applied to other situations such as the coupled Einstein Klein-Gordon equation.