Europe/Lisbon
Online

Carsten Gundlach
Carsten Gundlach, University of Southampton

The interplay of mathematics and numerics in understanding naked singularity formation in critical collapse

I will give an overview of numerical evidence that codimension one-sets of smooth initial data for matter coupled to GR form naked singularities – from scalar fields and fluids in spherical symmetry, where the evidence is strong, to vacuum GR, where the evidence is still confusing, but at least now beginning to be agreed by independent codes. Can one hope to prove some form of this naked singularity conjecture? In the last ten years or so, there has been considerable mathematical progress on the existence and stability of smooth self-similar blowup solutions in dispersive PDEs, and on naked singularity formation in GR. I will highlight some of these papers that particularly interest me as steps on the way to a future proof of naked singularity formation from codimension-one smooth initial data.