Critical Phenomena in Gravitational Collapse

Gundlach, Carsten; Martín-García, José M.

doi:10.12942/lrr-2007-5

Cited by 282 publications

(281 citation statements)

References 184 publications

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“…For instance, the onset of black-hole formation shows a surprising insensitivity to the initial data. Generically, the black hole mass as a function of a single control parameter parametrizing the initial data scales according to a power-law with the universal Choptuik exponent [3,4]. Whereas universality in statistical physics is typically associated with the presence of fluctuations on all scales, the example of gravitational collapse is observed in a purely classical deterministic setting.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Critical Schwinger Pair Production

Gies

Torgrimsson

2016

Phys. Rev. Lett.

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We investigate Schwinger pair production in spatially inhomogeneous electric backgrounds. A critical point for the onset of pair production can be approached by fields that marginally provide sufficient electrostatic energy for an off-shell long-range electron-positron fluctuation to become a real pair. Close to this critical point, we observe features of universality which are analogous to continuous phase transitions in critical phenomena with the pair-production rate serving as an order parameter: electric backgrounds can be subdivided into universality classes and the onset of pair production exhibits characteristic scaling laws. An appropriate design of the electric background field can interpolate between power-law scaling, essential BKT-type scaling and a power-law scaling with log corrections. The corresponding critical exponents only depend on the large-scale features of the electric background, whereas the microscopic details of the background play the role of irrelevant perturbations not affecting criticality.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Critical Schwinger Pair Production

Gies

Torgrimsson

2016

Phys. Rev. Lett.

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“…As time proceeds, the maximum of 2M/R initially decreases to around 0.5, moving outwards in radius, but then it moves towards the centre, maintaining an almost constant value but with a very slow decrease towards an eventual value of ∼ 0.48. This marks a "critical surface" that separates cases giving collapse to a black hole from ones which do not [30]. Supercritical and sub-critical cases eventually deviate away from this.…”

Section: Pos(bhs Gr and Strings)028mentioning

confidence: 97%

Primordial black hole formation

Musco

2009

Proceedings of Black Holes in General Relativity and String Theory — PoS(BHs, GR and Strings)

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This work is a review of our main results obtained from general relativistic numerical computations of primordial black-hole formation during the radiation-dominated era of the universe. As initial conditions we consider supra-horizon-scale perturbations of a type which could have come from inflation, with only a growing component and no decaying component. We use a spherically symmetric Lagrangian code and study both super-critical perturbations, which go on to produce black holes, and sub-critical perturbations, for which the overdensity eventually disperses into the background medium. For super-critical perturbations, we confirm the results of previous work but noticing that the threshold amplitude for a perturbation to lead to black-hole formation is substantially reduced when one considers initial perturbations with a length scale sufficiently larger than the cosmological horizon, according to initial cosmological perturbations coming from inflation. For sub-critical cases, where an initial collapse is followed by a subsequent re-expansion, strong compressions and rarefactions are seen for perturbation amplitudes near to the threshold. In order to study perturbations with amplitudes extremely close to the supposed critical limit, we have introduced into the code an adaptive mesh refinement scheme. This allows us to see that scaling-law behaviour continues down to the smallest black hole masses that we are able to follow and we see no evidence of shock production such as has been reported in some previous studies and which led there to a breaking of the scaling-law behaviour at small black-hole masses. We attribute this difference to the different initial conditions used.

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“…(See [3] for a general argument and [9] for a detailed discussion of the case of spherical symmetry in 2+1.) To look for this behaviour, we plot ln |R(t 0 , 0)| against ln |t * 0 − t 0 | and adjust the parameter t * 0 to optimise the linear fit.…”

Section: A Initial Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Similarly, critical phenomena can be understood in terms of a renormalisation group flow on the space of classical initial data in general relativity that is at the same time a physical time evolution, for suitable choices of the lapse and shift [3,4]. A novel feature in general relativity is the appearance of discrete self-similarity (DSS), rather than the continuous self-similarity (CSS) familiar elsewhere in physics (such as fluid dynamics).…”

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confidence: 99%

Critical collapse of a rotating scalar field in 2+1 dimensions

Jałmużna

Gundlach

2017

Phys. Rev. D

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We carry out numerical simulations of the collapse of a complex rotating scalar field of the form Ψ(t, r, θ) = e imθ Φ(t, r), giving rise to an axisymmetric metric, in 2+1 spacetime dimensions with cosmological constant Λ < 0, for m = 0, 1, 2, for four 1-parameter families of initial data. We look for the familiar scaling of black hole mass and maximal Ricci curvature as a power of |p − p * |, where p is the amplitude of our initial data and p * some threshold. We find evidence of Ricci scaling for all families, and tentative evidence of mass scaling for most families, but the case m > 0 is very different from the case m = 0 we have considered before: the thresholds for mass scaling and Ricci scaling are significantly different (for the same family), scaling stops well above the scale set by Λ, and the exponents depend strongly on the family. Hence, in contrast to the m = 0 case, and to many other self-gravitating systems, there is only weak evidence for the collapse threshold being controlled by a self-similar critical solution and no evidence for it being universal. CONTENTS

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Critical Phenomena in Gravitational Collapse

Cited by 282 publications

References 184 publications

Critical Schwinger Pair Production

Critical Schwinger Pair Production

Primordial black hole formation

Critical collapse of a rotating scalar field in 2+1 dimensions

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