String Theory seminar - Jorge Rocha Seminar

I will present a study of gravitational collapse in confined spaces employing the simplest possible two-body setting: a system composed of two thin shells in spherical symmetry. Confinement is introduced either by putting the system inside a totally reflecting spherical cavity or by formulating the problem in anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime. The two shells interact only through their gravitational attraction. The problem amounts to solving just two decoupled ODEs but it features highly non-trivial dynamics: depending on initial data, one observes prompt collapse, perpetual oscillations or black hole formation on arbitrarily long timescales. This confined double-shell system exhibits critical behavior reminiscent of the "turbulent" dynamics of massless scalar fields in AdS, as well as chaotic behavior. The AdS and the cavity settings show qualitatively similar dynamics, but there are some quantitative differences.