Universality of curvature invariants in critical vacuum gravitational collapse

Abstract

We report on a numerical study of gravitational waves undergoing gravitational collapse due to their self-interaction. We consider several families of asymptotically flat initial data which, similar to the well known Choptuik's discovery, can be fine-tuned between dispersal into empty space and collapse into a black hole. We find that near-critical spacetimes exhibit behavior similar to the collapse of scalar field: For different families of initial data, we observe universal "echoes" in the form of irregularly repeating approximate scaled copies of the same piece of spacetime.

5 pages, 3 figures. This updated version matches the published letter. The changes include the values of echo scaling ratios, simplified initial data description and a more readable Fig. 2

References in corpus (5)

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• On critical collapse of gravitational waves
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• Vacuum axisymmetric gravitational collapse revisited: preliminary investigation
• Critical phenomena in gravitational collapse with competing scalar field and gravitational waves, in 4+1 dimensions
• Twist and higher modes of a complex scalar field at the threshold of collapse
• Comparison of linear Brill and Teukolsky waves
• Critical collapse of a massive scalar field in semi-classical loop quantum gravity
• New numerical framework for the generalized Baumgarte-Shapiro-Shibata-Nakamura formulation: The vacuum case for spherical symmetry