The spherically symmetric collapse of a massless scalar field

Abstract

We report on a numerical study of the spherically symmetric collapse of a self-gravitating massless scalar field. Earlier results of Choptuik(1992, 1994) are confirmed. The field either disperses to infinity or collapses to a black hole, depending on the strength of the initial data. For evolutions where the strength is close to but below the strength required to form a black hole, we argue that there will be a region close to the axis where the scalar curvature and field energy density can reach arbitrarily large levels, and which is visible to distant observers