Evidence for violations of Weak Cosmic Censorship in black hole collisions in higher dimensions

Creators: Andrade, Tomas; Figueras, Pau; Sperhake, Ulrich

Abstract

We study collisions of boosted rotating black holes in D = 6 and 7 spacetime dimensions with a non-zero impact parameter. We find that there exists an open set of initial conditions such that the intermediate state of the collision is a black hole with a dumbbell-like horizon which is unstable to a local Gregory-Laflamme-type instability. We are able to provide convincing numerical evidence that the evolution of such an instability leads to a pinch off of the horizon in finite asymptotic time thus forming a naked singularity, as in similar unstable black holes. Since the black holes in the initial state are stable, this is the first genuinely generic evidence for the violation of the Weak Cosmic Censorship Conjecture in higher dimensional asymptotically flat spacetimes.

Additional Information

© 2022 The Authors. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits any use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. Article funded by SCOAP3. Received 30 November 2021. Accepted 23 February 2022. Published 17 March 2022. We thank Roberto Emparan for many insightful discussions. Our special thanks are for the entire GRChombo collaboration (https://www.grchombo.org/) for their help and support. TA is supported by the ERC Advanced Grant GravBHs-692951. He also thanks QMUL for the hospitality during the early stages of this project. PF is supported by the European Research Council Grant No. ERC-2014-StG 639022-NewNGR, by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (Grant No. UF140319 and URF\R\201026) and by a Royal Society Enhancement Award (Grant No. RGF\EA\180260). US acknowledges support from the European Union's H2020 ERC Consolidator Grant "Matter and strong-field gravity: new frontiers in Einstein's theory" Grant No. MaGRaTh-646597, the STFC Consolidator Grant No. ST/P000673/1, and the GWverse COST Action Grant No. CA16104, "Black holes, gravitational waves and fundamental physics". The simulations presented here were done on the MareNostrum4 cluster at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (Grant No. FI-2020-2-0011 and FI-2020-2-0016), the SDSC Comet and TACC Stampede2 clusters through NSF-XSEDE Grant No. PHY-090003, and the Cambridge Service for Data Driven Discovery (CSD3), part of which is operated by the University of Cambridge Research Computing on behalf of the STFC DiRAC HPC Facility (https://dirac.ac.uk/). The DiRAC component of CSD3 was funded by BEIS capital funding via STFC capital grants ST/P002307/1 and ST/R002452/1 and STFC operations grant ST/R00689X/1. DiRAC is part of the National e-Infrastructure.

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Published - Andrade2022_Article_EvidenceForViolationsOfWeakCos.pdf

Submitted - 2011.03049.pdf

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