No Arabic abstract
We revisit the mechanism for violating the weak cosmic-censorship conjecture (WCCC) by overspinning a nearly-extreme charged black hole. The mechanism consists of an incoming massless neutral scalar particle, with low energy and large angular momentum, tunneling into the hole. We investigate the effect of the large angular momentum of the incoming particle on the background geometry and address recent claims that such a back-reaction would invalidate the mechanism. We show that the large angular momentum of the incident particle does not constitute an obvious impediment to the success of the overspinning quantum mechanism, although the induced back-reaction turns out to be essential to restoring the validity of the WCCC in the classical regime. These results seem to endorse the view that the cosmic censor may be oblivious to processes involving quantum effects.
A possible process to destroy a black hole consists on throwing point particles with sufficiently large angular momentum into the black hole. In the case of Kerr black holes, it was shown by Wald that particles with dangerously large angular momentum are simply not captured by the hole, and thus the event horizon is not destroyed. Here we reconsider this gedanken experiment for a variety of black hole geometries, from black holes in higher dimensions to black rings. We show that this particular way of destroying a black hole does not succeed and that Cosmic Censorship is preserved.
We perform extensive nonlinear numerical simulations of the spherical collapse of (charged) wavepackets onto a charged black hole within Einstein-Maxwell theory and in Einstein-Maxwell-scalar theory featuring nonminimal couplings and a spontaneous scalarization mechanism. We confirm that black holes in full-fledged Einstein-Maxwell theory cannot be overcharged past extremality and no naked singularities form, in agreement with the cosmic censorship conjecture. We show that naked singularities do not form even in Einstein-Maxwell-scalar theory, although it is possible to form scalarized black holes with charge above the Reissner-Nordstrom bound. We argue that charge and mass extraction due to superradiance at fully nonlinear level is crucial to bound the charge-to-mass ratio of the final black hole below extremality. We also discuss some descalarization mechanisms for scalarized black holes induced either by superradiance or by absorption of an opposite-charged wavepacket; in all cases the final state after descalarization is a subextremal Reissner-Nordstrom black hole.
We study the realistic structure of F-term Nambu-Goto cosmic strings forming in a general supersymmetric Grand Unified Theory implementation, assuming standard hybrid inflation. Examining the symmetry breaking of the unification gauge group down to the Standard Model, we discuss the minimal field content necessary to describe abelian cosmic strings appearing at the end of inflation. We find that several fields will condense in most theories, questioning the plausible occurrence of associated currents (bosonic and fermionic). We perturbatively evaluate the modification of their energy per unit length due to the condensates. We provide a criterion for comparing the usual abelian Higgs approximation used in cosmology to realistic situations.
We study the bosonic structure of $F$-term Nambu-Goto cosmic strings forming in a realistic SO(10) implementation, assuming standard hybrid inflation. We describe the supersymmetric grand unified theory, and its spontaneous symmetry breaking scheme in parallel with the inflationary process. We also write the explicit tensor formulation of its scalar sector, focusing on the sub-representations singlet under the standard model, which is sufficient to describe the string structure. We then introduce an ansatz for abelian cosmic strings, discussing in details the hypothesis, and write down the field equations and boundary conditions. Finally, after doing a perturbative study of the model, we present and discuss the results obtained with numerical solutions of the string structure.
It is shown that a general radial conformal Killing vector in Minkowski space-time can be associated to a generator of time evolution in conformal quantum mechanics. Among these conformal Killing vectors one finds a class which maps causal diamonds in Minkowski space-time into themselves. The flow of such Killing vectors describes worldlines of accelerated observers with a finite lifetime within the causal diamond. Time evolution of static diamond observers is equivalent to time evolution in conformal quantum mechanics governed by a hyperbolic Hamiltonian and covering only a segment of the time axis. This indicates that the Unruh temperature perceived by static diamond observers in the vacuum state of inertial observers in Minkowski space can be obtained from the behaviour of the two-point functions of conformal quantum mechanics.