A (gravitational) toy story

Abstract

Frequently in Physics, insights and conclusions can be drawn from simple, idealized models. The discovery of critical behavior in the gravitational collapse of a massless scalar field leads to the simulation of binary black holes, from its coalescence to merging and ringdown. We refined a toy model to explore black hole formation as these events unfold to revisit the instability of a gravitational kink. We confirmed a conjecture related to a mass gap, for critical behavior at the threshold of black hole formation. We find a critical exponent twice the standard value. Surprisingly, this larger critical exponent is also present in the multiple critical behavior for the black hole formation from a massless scalar field in asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetimes. What is the meaning of this mass gap? Does it have physical relevance?

10 pages, 4 figures; updated version to appear in Int. J. Modern Phys. D

References in corpus (8)

• Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
• Astrophysical signatures of boson stars: quasinormal modes and inspiral resonances
• Compactlike kinks and vortices in generalized models
• New Features of Gravitational Collapse in Anti-de Sitter Spacetimes
• Moving Closer to the Collapse of a Massless Scalar Field in Spherically Symmetric Anti-de Sitter Spacetimes
• Gravitational Instability of a Kink
• Universal critical behavior of the two-magnon-bound-state mass gap for the (2+1)-dimensional Ising model
• Mass gap in the critical gravitational collapse of a kink