Critical behavior in 3-d gravitational collapse of massless scalar fields

TL;DR

This paper investigates critical phenomena in three-dimensional gravitational collapse driven by a massless scalar field, revealing that non-spherical initial conditions lead to the same critical solution as in spherical symmetry.

Contribution

First study of critical behavior in 3D gravitational collapse with a massless scalar field, validating spherical symmetry results in non-spherical cases.

Findings

Critical solution matches spherical symmetry even with non-spherical initial data.

Simulations confirm reliability and accuracy in 3D gravitational collapse.

Both supercritical and subcritical evolutions analyzed for robustness.

Abstract

We present results from the first study of critical behavior in 3-d gravitational collapse. The source of the gravitational field is a massless scalar field. This is a well-studied case for spherically symmetric gravitational collapse, allowing us to understand the reliability and accuracy of the simulations. We study both supercritical and subcritical evolutions to see if one provides more accurate results than the other. We find that even for non-spherical initial data with 35 percent of the power in the $\ell=2$ spherical harmonic, the critical solution is the same as in spherical symmetry.