No Arabic abstract
Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity (EGB) provides a natural higher dimensional and higher order curvature generalization of Einstein gravity. It contains a new, presumably microscopic, length scale that should affect short distance properties of the dynamics, such as Choptuik scaling. We present the results of a numerical analysis in generalized flat slice co-ordinates of self-gravitating massless scalar spherical collapse in five and six dimensional EGB gravity near the threshold of black hole formation. Remarkably, the behaviour is universal (i.e. independent of initial data) but qualitatively different in five and six dimensions. In five dimensions there is a minimum horizon radius, suggestive of a first order transition between black hole and dispersive initial data. In six dimensions no radius gap is evident. Instead, below the GB scale there is a change in the critical exponent and echoing period.
We compute the Hamiltonian for spherically symmetric scalar field collapse in Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity in D dimensions using slicings that are regular across future horizons. We first reduce the Lagrangian to two dimensions using spherical symmetry. We then show that choosing the spatial coordinate to be a function of the areal radius leads to a relatively simple Hamiltonian constraint whose gravitational part is the gradient of the generalized mass function. Next we complete the gauge fixing such that the metric is the Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet generalization of non-static Painleve-Gullstrand coordinates. Finally, we derive the resultant reduced equations of motion for the scalar field. These equations are suitable for use in numerical simulations of spherically symmetric scalar field collapse in Gauss-Bonnet gravity and can readily be generalized to other matter fields minimally coupled to gravity.
We present results from a numerical study of spherical gravitational collapse in shift symmetric Einstein dilaton Gauss-Bonnet (EdGB) gravity. This modified gravity theory has a single coupling parameter that when zero reduces to general relativity (GR) minimally coupled to a massless scalar field. We first show results from the weak EdGB coupling limit, where we obtain solutions that smoothly approach those of the Einstein-Klein-Gordon system of GR. Here, in the strong field case, though our code does not utilize horizon penetrating coordinates, we nevertheless find tentative evidence that approaching black hole formation the EdGB modifications cause the growth of scalar field hair, consistent with known static black hole solutions in EdGB gravity. For the strong EdGB coupling regime, in a companion paper we first showed results that even in the weak field (i.e. far from black hole formation), the EdGB equations are of mixed type: evolution of the initially hyperbolic system of partial differential equations lead to formation of a region where their character changes to elliptic. Here, we present more details about this regime. In particular, we show that an effective energy density based on the Misner-Sharp mass is negative near these elliptic regions, and similarly the null convergence condition is violated then.
To ensure the existence of a well defined linearized gravitational wave equation, we show that the spacetimes in the so-called Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity in four dimension have to be locally conformally flat.
We report on a numerical investigation of the stability of scalarized black holes in Einstein dilaton Gauss-Bonnet (EdGB) gravity in the full dynamical theory, though restricted to spherical symmetry. We find evidence that for sufficiently small curvature-couplings the resulting scalarized black hole solutions are nonlinearly stable. For such small couplings, we show that an elliptic region forms inside these EdGB black hole spacetimes (prior to any curvature singularity), and give evidence that this region remains censored from asymptotic view. However, for coupling values superextremal relative to a given black hole mass, an elliptic region forms exterior to the horizon, implying the exterior Cauchy problem is ill-posed in this regime.
In order to perform model-dependent tests of general relativity with gravitational wave observations, we must have access to numerical relativity binary black hole waveforms in theories beyond general relativity (GR). In this study, we focus on order-reduced Einstein dilaton Gauss-Bonnet gravity (EDGB), a higher curvature beyond-GR theory with motivations in string theory. The stability of single, rotating black holes in EDGB is unknown, but is a necessary condition for being able to simulate binary black hole systems (especially the early-inspiral and late ringdown stages) in EDGB. We thus investigate the stability of rotating black holes in order-reduced EDGB. We evolve the leading-order EDGB scalar field and EDGB spacetime metric deformation on a rotating black hole background, for a variety of spins. We find that the EDGB metric deformation exhibits linear growth, but that this level of growth exponentially converges to zero with numerical resolution. Thus, we conclude that rotating black holes in EDGB are numerically stable to leading-order, thus satisfying our necessary condition for performing binary black hole simulations in EDGB.