Particle Theory Seminar - The Gregory-Laflamme instability of black strings revisited. - Pau Figueras, Queen Mary University of London

The Gregory-Laflamme instability of black strings revisited.

In this talk I will discuss our recent work that reproduces and extends the famous work of Lehner and Pretorius on the end point of the Gregory-Laflamme instability of black strings. We consider black strings of different thicknesses and our numerics allow us to get closer to the singularity than ever before. In particular, while our results support the picture of the formation of a naked singularity in finite asymptotic time, the process is more complex than previously thought. Towards the end of the talk, I will discuss the possibility that the pinch off of the black string is controlled by a continuous self-similar solution of the Einstein equations, similar to the situation in fluid dynamics.