2008/11/25 by Luis Álvarez-Gaumé, Luis Alvarez-Gaume, Cesar Gomez +6 · 82 citations
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Classical mechanics #Collision #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Critical exponent #Critical phenomena #Geometry #Mathematical physics #Mathematics #Mechanics #Minkowski space #Phase transition #Physics #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Quantum mechanics #Scaling #Shock (circulatory) #Shock wave #Space (punctuation) #Surface (topology) #Transverse plane #gr-qc #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2009/02/009
published in Journal of High Energy Physics 2009(02), 009 (Springer Nature) · 16 pages
arxiv created 2008/11/25 · openalex publication_date 2009/02/04 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
We study the formation of marginally trapped surfaces in the head-on collision of two shock waves both in anti-de Sitter and Minkowski space-time in various dimensions as a function of the spread of the energy density in transverse space. For D=4 and D=5 it is shown that there exists a critical value of this spread above which no solution to the trapped surface equation is found. In four dimensions the trapped surface at criticality has a finite size, whereas in five the critical size vanishes. In both cases we find scaling relations characterized by critical exponents. Finally, when D>5 there is always a solution to the trapped surface equation for any transverse spread.