We begin by reviewing some fundamental features of general relativity, then outline the mathematical definitions of black holes, trapped surfaces, and marginally trapped tubes, first in general terms, then rigorously in the context of spherical symmetry. We describe explicitly the reduction of Einstein's equation on a spherically symmetric 4-dimensional Lorentzian manifold to a system of partial differential equations on a subset of 2-dimensional Minkowski space. We discuss the asymptotic behavior of marginally trapped tubes in the Schwarzschild, Vaidya, and Reisner-Nördstrom solutions to Einstein's equations in spherical symmetry, as well as in Einstein-Maxwell-scalar field black hole spacetimes generated by evolving certain classes of asymptotically flat initial data.

Our first main result gives conditions on a general stress-energy tensor T_αβ in a spherically symmetric black hole spacetime that are sufficient to guarantee that the black hole will contain a marginally trapped tube which is eventually achronal, connected, and asymptotic to the event horizon. Here "general" means that the matter model is arbitrary, subject only to a certain positive energy condition. A certain matter field decay rate, known as Price law decay in the literature, is not required per se for this asymptotic result, but such decay does imply that the marginally trapped tube has finite length with respect to the induced metric. In our second main result, we give two separate applications of the first theorem to self-gravitating Higgs field spacetimes, one using weak Price law decay, the other certain strong smallness and monotonicity assumptions.