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Collapse of self-interacting fields in asymptotically flat spacetimes: Do self-interactions render Minkowski spacetime unstable?

Hirotada Okawa¹, Vitor Cardoso^1,2, and Paolo Pani^1,3

¹Departamento de Física, Instituto Superior Técnico, CENTRA, Universidade de Lisboa, Avenida Rovisco Pais 1, 1049 Lisboa, Portugal
²Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario N2J 2W9, Canada
³Institute for Theory and Computation, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA

Phys. Rev. D 89, 041502(R) – Published 24 February, 2014

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.89.041502

Abstract

The nonlinear instability of anti-de Sitter spacetime has recently been established with the striking result that generic initial data collapse to form black holes. This outcome suggests that confined matter might generically collapse, and that collapse could only be halted—at most—by nonlinear bound states. Here, we provide evidence that such a mechanism can operate even in asymptotically flat spacetimes by studying the evolution of the Einstein-Klein-Gordon system for a self-interacting scalar field. We show that (i) configurations which do not collapse promptly can do so after successive reflections off the potential barrier, but (ii) that at intermediate amplitudes and Compton wavelengths, collapse to black holes is replaced by the appearance of oscillating soliton stars, or “oscillatons.” Finally, (iii) for very small initial amplitudes, the field disperses away in a manner consistent with power-law tails of massive fields. Minkowski is stable against gravitational collapse. Our results provide one further piece to the rich phenomenology of gravitational collapse and show the important interplay between bound states, blueshift, dissipation and confinement effects.

Article Text

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