New Features of Gravitational Collapse in Anti–de Sitter Spacetimes

Gravitational collapse of a massless scalar field in spherically symmetric anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetimes presents a new phenomenology with a series of critical points whose dynamics is discretely self-similar as in the asymptotically flat case. Each critical point is the limit of a branch of scalar field configurations that have bounced off the AdS boundary a fixed number of times before forming an apparent horizon. We present results from a numerical study that focus on the interfaces between branches. We find that there is a mass gap between branches and that subcritical configurations near the critical point form black holes with an apparent horizon mass that follows a power law of the form M (AH) -M (g) ∝ (p (c) -p) ^ (ξ), where M (g) is the mass gap and the exponent ξ≃0. 7 appears to be universal.