Marginally trapped submanifolds in generalized Robertson–Walker spacetimes

In this paper we consider codimension two marginally trapped submanifolds in the family of general Robertson–Walker spacetimes. In particular, we derive some rigidity results for this type of submanifolds which guarantee that, under appropriate hypothesis, the only ones are those contained in slices. We also derive some interesting non-existence results for weakly trapped submanifolds. In particular, we give applications to some cases of physical relevance such as the Einstein-de Sitter spacetime and certain open regions of de Sitter spacetime, including the so called steady state spacetime. Our results will be an application of the (finite) maximum principle for closed manifolds and, more generally, of the weak maximum principle for stochastically complete manifolds.