String Theory seminar - Markus Kunesch Seminar

In this talk I will present the results of fully nonlinear numerical simulations of black rings and Myers-Perry black holes in five and six dimensions. Most importantly, our simulations of black rings provide the first concrete evidence that the weak cosmic censorship conjecture can be violated in five dimensional asymptotically flat spacetimes. Furthermore, we have discovered a new instability in black rings which stretches the ring without substantially changing its thickness. This instability completely dominates the evolution for rings of intermediate thickness and always leads to the collapse to a black hole of spherical topology. For very thin rings the Gregory-Laflamme instability becomes dominant and eventually gives the ring a fractal structure of bulges connected by necks which become ever thinner over time. I will argue that this suggests that very thin black rings break and hence violate weak cosmic censorship.