All nonspherical perturbations of the Choptuik spacetime decay

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that all nonspherical linear perturbations of Choptuik's critical solution decay, indicating that critical collapse phenomena are robust and extend beyond spherical symmetry.

Contribution

It provides the first analysis showing the decay of nonspherical perturbations in Choptuik's spacetime, extending the understanding of critical phenomena.

Findings

All nonspherical perturbations decay over time.

Critical phenomena are stable under nonspherical perturbations.

Spherical symmetry is not essential for critical collapse behavior.

Abstract

We study the nonspherical linear perturbations of the discretely self-similar and spherically symmetric solution for a self-gravitating scalar field discovered by Choptuik in the context of marginal gravitational collapse. We find that all nonspherical perturbations decay. Therefore critical phenomena at the threshold of gravitational collapse, originally found in spherical symmetry, will extend to (at least slightly) nonspherical initial data.