Scattering for critical wave equations with variable coefficients

Abstract: We prove that solutions to the quintic semilinear wave equation with variable coefficients in $\mathbb R^{1+3}$ scatter to a solution to the corresponding linear wave equation. The coefficients are small and decay as $|x|\to\infty$, but are allowed to be time dependent. The proof uses local energy decay estimates to establish the decay of the $L^6$ norm of the solution as $t\to\infty$.