Naked singularities as particle accelerators

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that naked singularities formed during gravitational collapse can act as natural particle accelerators, achieving arbitrarily high energies and potentially probing Planck scale physics, surpassing black hole capabilities.

Contribution

It shows that naked singularities can serve as more effective particle accelerators than black holes for exploring high-energy physics near the Planck scale.

Findings

Collisions near the Cauchy horizon reach arbitrarily high energies.

Naked singularities can serve as natural particle accelerators.

Potential to probe Planck scale physics.

Abstract

We investigate here the particle acceleration by naked singularities to arbitrarily high center of mass energies. Recently it has been suggested that black holes could be used as particle accelerators to probe the Planck scale physics. We show that the naked singularities serve the same purpose and probably would do better than their black hole counterparts. We focus on the scenario of a self-similar gravitational collapse starting from a regular initial data, leading to the formation of a globally naked singularity. It is seen that when particles moving along timelike geodesics interact and collide near the Cauchy horizon, the energy of collision in the center of mass frame will be arbitrarily high, thus offering a window to Planck scale physics.