Gravitational collapse in pure Lovelock gravity in higher dimensions

TL;DR

This paper investigates gravitational collapse in higher-dimensional pure Lovelock gravity, revealing a tendency towards naked singularities over black holes, with similar singularity strengths as in Einstein gravity.

Contribution

It provides the first analysis of collapse dynamics in pure Lovelock gravity in higher dimensions, highlighting differences from Einstein gravity regarding singularity formation.

Findings

Pure Lovelock collapse favors naked singularities.

Singularity strength is similar to Einstein gravity.

Collapse behavior depends on the dimension and Lovelock order.

Abstract

We study collapse of inhomogeneous dust and null dust (Vaidya radiation) in pure Lovelock gravity in higher dimensions. Since pure Lovelock gravity is kinematic in odd d=2N+1 dimension, hence pertinent dimension for the study is even d=2N+2, where N is degree of Lovelock polynomial. It turns out that pure Lovelock collapse favors naked singularity as against black hole for the Einstein case in the same dimension while strength of singularity as measured by divergence of Kretshmann scalar is interestingly the same in the two cases; i.e. the corresponding scalars have the same fall off behavior.