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GR: Fachverband Gravitation und Relativitätstheorie

GR 201: Hauptvorträge Dienstag

GR 201.1: Invited Talk

Tuesday, March 6, 2007, 09:00–09:45, INF 308 Kl. HS

Vacuum gravitational collapse in higher dimensions — •Piotr Bizon — Institute of Physics, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland

Our current mathematical understanding of the dynamics of gravitational collapse to a black hole is limited to the spherically symmetric situation and, in fact, even in this case much remains to be learned. The reason is that Einstein's equations become tractable only if they are reduced to a 1+1 dimensional system of partial differential equations. Due to this technical obstacle, very little is known about the collapse of pure gravitational waves because by Birkhoff's theorem there is no spherical collapse in vacuum.

In my talk I will describe recent joint work with T. Chmaj, B. Schmidt and G. Gibbons on the new cohomogeneity-two symmetry reduction of the vacuum Einstein equations in five and higher odd dimensions which evades Birkhoff's theorem and admits time dependent asymptotically flat solutions. I will show that this model provides an attractive 1+1 dimensional geometric setting for investigating the dynamics of gravitational collapse in vacuum.