Gravity Seminar: Critical phenomena of a complex scalar field using bamps, Krinio Marouda, Instituto Superior Técnico (CENTRA)

It has been thirty years since the first breakthrough paper of M. Choptuik on critical phenomena in the gravitational collapse of a real scalar field minimally coupled to general relativity in spherical symmetry. This celebrated paper led to a rich exploration of different extreme spacetimes in numerical relativity in the years following its publication, continuously questioning the weak cosmic censorship conjecture. One would naively expect these phenomena generalize to full 3D. However, recent research has given numerical evidence that universality of the critical solutions breaks down already in axisymmetry, for instance, in the case of vacuum collapse of gravitational waves. In our work, we examine the gravitational collapse of a massless complex scalar field minimally coupled to GR, for the first time using a pseudospectral code (bamps), in spherical symmetry and beyond. We focus on that particular region in the phase space of initial data that captures deviations from spherical symmetry, following closely the relevant recent study of the real scalar field case for comparison. In this talk, I will give a brief literature overview of the current status of the field and I will show some preliminary results in spherical symmetry and departures from it, in an attempt to merge the gap in the literature regarding the genericity of the critical solution.