Abstract
Gravitational collapse of a massless scalar field in spherically symmetric anti–de Sitter (AdS) spacetimes presents a new phenomenology with a series of critical points whose dynamics is discretely self-similar as in the asymptotically flat case. Each critical point is the limit of a branch of scalar field configurations that have bounced off the AdS boundary a fixed number of times before forming an apparent horizon. We present results from a numerical study that focus on the interfaces between branches. We find that there is a mass gap between branches and that subcritical configurations near the critical point form black holes with an apparent horizon mass that follows a power law of the form , where is the mass gap and the exponent appears to be universal.
- Received 14 November 2015
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.041101
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