A (gravitational) toy story

Abstract

Frequently in Physics, insights and conclusions can be drawn from simple, idealized models. The discovery of critical behavior in the gravitational collapse of a massless scalar field leads to the simulation of binary black holes, from its coalescence to merging and ringdown. We refined a toy model to explore black hole formation as these events unfold to revisit the instability of a gravitational kink. We confirmed a conjecture related to a mass gap for critical behavior at the threshold of black hole formation. We find a critical exponent twice the standard value. Surprisingly, this larger critical exponent is also present in the multiple critical behavior for the black hole formation from a massless scalar field in asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetimes. What is the meaning of this mass gap? Does it have physical relevance?