While it is widely believed that the gravitational collapse of a sufficiently large mass will lead to a density singularity and an event horizon, we propose that this never happens when quantum effects are taken into account. In particular, we propos
e that when the conditions become ripe for a trapped surface to form, a quantum critical surface sweeps over the collapsing body, transforming the nucleons in the collapsing matter into a lepton/photon gas together with a positive vacuum energy. This will happen regardless of the matter density at the time a trapped surface starts to form, and as a result we predict that at least in all cases of gravitational collapse involving ordinary matter, a large fraction of the rest mass of the collapsing matter will be converted into a burst of neutrinos, and {gamma}-rays. We predict that the peak luminosity of these bursts is only weakly dependent on the mass of the collapsing object, and is on the order of ({epsilon}_q/m_Pc^2)^1/4c^5/G, where {epsilon}_q is the mean energy of a nucleon parton and m_P is the Planck mass. The duration of the bursts will depend the mass of the collapsing objects; in the case of stellar core collapse we predict that the duration of both the neutrino and {gamma}-ray bursts will be on the order of 10 seconds.
Time stands still at a quantum critical point in the sense that correlation functions near to the critical point are approximately independent of frequency. In the case of a quantum liquid this would imply that classical hydrodynamics breaks down nea
r to the critical point, revealing the underlying quantum degrees of freedom. An opportunity to see this effect for the first time in the laboratory may be provided by relativistic heavy ion collisions that are tuned so that the quark-gluon plasma passes through its critical point forming a closed critical surface. In this note we point out that in certain kinds of quantum fluids the temperature of a spherical critical surface will be proportional to (radius)-1 and the entropy inside the surface will be close to the Bekenstein bound. In these cases the breakdown in hydrodynamics near to the critical point might serve as a model for the behavior of quantum gravity near to an event horizon. Such a possibility is a fortiori notable because general relativity predicts that nothing should happen at an event horizon.
In this note we observe that the exact Maxwell-Einstein equations in the background metric of a spinning string can be solved analytically. This allows us to construct an analytical model for the magnetosphere which is approximately force free near t
o the spinning string. As in the case of a Kerr black hole in the presence of an external magnetic field the spinning string will acquire an electric charge which depends on the vorticity carried by the spinning string. The self-generated magnetic field and currents strongly resemble the current and magnetic field structure of the jets associated with active galaxies as they emerge from the galactic center.
An initial state for the observable universe consisting of a finite region with a large vacuum energy will break-up due to near horizon quantum critical fluctuations. This will lead to a Friedmann-like early universe consisting of an expanding cloud
of dark energy stars and radiation. In this note we point out that this scenario provides a simple explanation for the present day density of dark matter as well as the level of CMB temperature flucuations. It is also predicted that all dark matter will be clumped on mass scales ~ 10E3 solar masses.
The theory of dark energy stars illustrates how the behavior of matter near to certain kinds of quantum critical phase transitions can be given a geometrical interpretation by regarding the criticality tuning parameter as an extra dimension. In the c
ase of a superfluid with vanishing speed of sound, the implied geometry resembles 5-dimensional anti-de-Sitter. In a dark energy star this geometry applies both inside and outside the horizon radius, so the AdS-CFT correspondence is consistent with the idea that the surface of a compact astrophysical object represents a quantum critical phase transition of space-time. The superfluid transition in a chiron gas, which was originally proposed as a theory of high temperature superconductivity, may provide an exact theory of this transition.
