The (Unstable) Threshold of Black Hole Formation

Abstract

In recent years it has become apparent that intriguing phenomenology exists at the threshold of black hole formation in a large class of general relativistic collapse models. This phenomenology, which includes scaling, self-similarity and universality, is largely analogous to statistical mechanical critical behaviour, a fact which was first noted empirically, and subsequently clarified by perturbative calculations which borrow on ideas and techniques from dynamical systems theory and renormalization group theory. This contribution, which closely parallels my talk at the conference, consists of an overview of the considerable ``zoo''' of critical solutions which have been discovered thus far, along with a brief discussion of how we currently understand the nature of these solutions from the point of view of perturbation theory.