Choptuik's critical spacetime exists

Abstract

About twenty years ago, Choptuik studied numerically the gravitational collapse (Einstein field equations) of a massless scalar field in spherical symmetry, and found strong evidence for a universal, self-similar solution at the threshold of black hole formation. We prove rigorously the existence of a real analytic solution, that we interpret as the solution observed by Choptuik. Our construction covers an open neighborhood of the past light cone of the singularity. The proof is computer assisted. Starting from an explicit approximate solution, we show that nearby there is a true solution. The source code and a high precision data file (about 80 significant decimal digits, with rigorous error bounds) are included. We do not study perturbations.