Formation of Frozen Stars from collapsing matter by tunneling

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that collapsing matter can quantum tunnel into a frozen star, a black hole mimicker with a regular interior, with near certainty, providing a potential formation mechanism for these exotic objects.

Contribution

It shows that the transition from collapsing matter to a frozen star occurs with probability close to one, extending previous work with improved tunneling calculations.

Findings

Transition probability is effectively unity.

Frozen stars can form from collapsing matter via tunneling.

Supports the viability of frozen stars as black hole mimickers.

Abstract

The frozen star is a type of black hole mimicker: An ultracompact object whose exterior geometry resembles that of a general-relativistic black hole but differs in its matter composition and in the regularity of its interior geometry. It is sourced by a spherically symmetric collection of open-string flux tubes, which posses an extremely anisotropic energy-momentum-stress tensor with maximally negative radial pressure. The frozen star represents an effective classical description of the highly quantum, closed-string polymer model. A key challenge for any model of a black hole mimicker is to explain how such objects can form from a collapsing body of matter. We started to address this important problem in a previous article by adapting the Euclidean-action method of Gibbons and Hawking to show that the transition into a frozen star is likely. Here, we improve on our previous results by showing that the transition probability for a collapsing shell of matter to tunnel quantum mechanically into a frozen star is unity, up to negligible corrections. Our conclusion is that such a transition is therefore inevitable.