Gravitational collapse of charged scalar fields

Abstract

In order to study the gravitational collapse of charged matter we analyze the simple model of an self-gravitating massless scalar field coupled to the electromagnetic field in spherical symmetry. The evolution equations for the Maxwell-Klein-Gordon sector are derived in the 3+1 formalism, and coupled to gravity by means of the stress-energy tensor of these fields. To solve consistently the full system we employ a generalized Baumgarte-Shapiro-Shibata-Nakamura (BSSN) formulation of General Relativity that is adapted to spherical symmetry. We consider two sets of initial data that represent a time symmetric spherical thick shell of charged scalar field, and differ by the fact that one set has zero global electrical charge while the other has non-zero global charge. For compact enough initial shells we find that the configuration doesn't disperse and approaches a final state corresponding to a sub-extremal Reissner-N\"ordstrom black hole with $|Q|<M$. By increasing the fundamental charge of the scalar field $q$ we find that the final black hole tends to become more and more neutral. Our results support the cosmic censorship conjecture for the case of charged matter.