Critical behavior in 3D gravitational collapse of massless scalar fields

Abstract

We present results from a study of critical behavior in 3D gravitational collapse with no symmetry assumptions. The source of the gravitational field is a massless scalar field. This is a well-studied case for spherically symmetric gravitational collapse, allowing us to understand the reliability and accuracy of the simulations. We study both supercritical and subcritical evolutions to see if one provides more accurate results than the other. We find that even for nonspherical initial data with 35% of the power in the ℓ=2 spherical harmonic, the critical solution is the same as in spherical symmetry.

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