Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Recent work has used the method of characteristic gluing to construct spacetimes violating the third law of black hole mechanics. This paper uses numerical methods to investigate two aspects of the gluing construction of solutions describing the gravitational collapse of a charged scalar field to form an extremal Reissner-Nordström black hole. First, for a massless scalar field, we improve significantly the lower bounds on the size of the final black hole for which gluing is possible. Second, for a massive scalar field, it is known that the formation of an extremal Reissner--Nordström black hole is impossible if the mass-to-charge ratio of the scalar field exceeds unity. We present strong evidence that this bound is sharp by constructing gluing solutions with a scalar field mass-to-charge ratio just below unity.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Author: Lee, Junwoo
Institution: University of Cambridge
Language: English
Subfield: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7214037577