Lecture Notes on Turbulent Instability of Anti-de Sitter Spacetime

TL;DR

This paper discusses the conjectured instability of anti-de Sitter spacetime, showing how small perturbations can lead to gravitational collapse, based on numerical studies of Einstein-scalar field equations.

Contribution

It provides detailed technical insights into the numerical methods used to study the instability of anti-de Sitter space, supporting the conjecture.

Findings

Small perturbations can cause gravitational collapse in AdS space

Numerical methods reveal the instability mechanism

Supports the conjecture of AdS instability

Abstract

In these lecture notes we discuss recently conjectured instability of anti-de Sitter space, resulting in gravitational collapse of a large class of arbitrarily small initial perturbations. We uncover the technical details used in the numerical study of spherically symmetric Einstein-massless scalar field system with negative cosmological constant that led to the conjectured instability.