Collective baryon decay and gravitational collapse

TL;DR

This paper proposes that quantum effects prevent black hole formation during gravitational collapse, leading to observable bursts of neutrinos and gamma rays instead of singularities.

Contribution

It introduces a quantum critical surface concept that halts collapse, transforming matter into a lepton/photon gas and predicting specific high-energy burst signatures.

Findings

Collapse results in neutrino and gamma-ray bursts.

Peak luminosity is weakly dependent on mass.

Burst duration is about 10 seconds for stellar collapse.

Abstract

While it is widely believed that the gravitational collapse of a sufficiently large mass will lead to a density singularity and an event horizon, we propose that this never happens when quantum effects are taken into account. In particular, we propose that when the conditions become ripe for a trapped surface to form, a quantum critical surface sweeps over the collapsing body, transforming the nucleons in the collapsing matter into a lepton/photon gas together with a positive vacuum energy. This will happen regardless of the matter density at the time a trapped surface starts to form, and as a result we predict that at least in all cases of gravitational collapse involving ordinary matter, a large fraction of the rest mass of the collapsing matter will be converted into a burst of neutrinos, and {\gamma}-rays. We predict that the peak luminosity of these bursts is only weakly dependent on the mass of the collapsing object, and is on the order of ({\epsilon}_q/m_Pc^2)^1/4c^5/G, where {\epsilon}_q is the mean energy of a nucleon parton and m_P is the Planck mass. The duration of the bursts will depend the mass of the collapsing objects; in the case of stellar core collapse we predict that the duration of both the neutrino and {\gamma}-ray bursts will be on the order of 10 seconds.