Paper detail

Collapse of massive fields in anti-de Sitter spacetime

Gravitational collapse in asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetime has a rich but poorly-understood structure. There are strong indications that some families of initial data form "bound" states, which are regular everywhere, while other families seem to always collapse to black holes. Here, we investigate the collapse of massive scalar fields in anti-de Sitter, with enlarged freedom in the initial data setup, such as several distinct wavepackets, gravitationally interacting with each other. Our results are fully consistent with previous findings in the literature: massive fields, which have a fully resonant spectra, collapse at (arbitrarily?) small amplitude for some classes of initial data, and form oscillating stars for others. We find evidence that initial data consisting on several wavepackets may allow efficient exchange of energy between them, and delay the collapse substantially, or avoid it altogether. When the AdS boundary is artificially changed so that the spectrum is no longer resonant, cascading to higher frequencies may still be present. Finally, we comment on the asymptotically flat counterparts.