Non-local (but also non-singular) physics at the last stages of gravitational collapse

Abstract

We study the end stages of gravitational collapse of the thin shell of matter in ingoing Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates. We use the functional Schrodinger formalism to capture quantum effects in the near singularity limit. We find that that the equations of motion which govern the behavior of the collapsing shell near the classical singularity become strongly non-local. This reinforces previous arguments that quantum gravity in the strong field regime might be non-local. We managed to solve the non-local equation of motion for the dust shell case, and found an explicit form of the wavefunction describing the collapsing shell. This wavefunction and the corresponding probability density are non-singular at the origin, thus indicating that quantization should be able to rid gravity of singularities, just as it was the case with the singular Coulomb potential.