17–20 Aug 2016
Nordita, Stockholm
Europe/Stockholm timezone

Collisions of pointlike particles in three-dimensional anti-deSitter space

17 Aug 2016, 18:40
20m
Wallenbergsalen (Nordita, Stockholm)

Wallenbergsalen

Nordita, Stockholm

Speaker

Jonathan Lindgren (VUB)

Description

We study collisions of many point-like particles in three dimensional anti-de Sitter space, generalizing the known result with two particles. We show how to construct exact solutions corresponding to the formation of either a black hole or a conical singularity from the collision of an arbitrary number of massless particles falling in radially from the boundary. We find that when going away from the case of discrete rotational symmetry, this is not a trivial generalization of the two-particle case, but requires that the excised wedges corresponding to the particles must be chosen in a very precise way for a consistent solution. We also explicitly take the limit when the number of particles goes to infinity and obtain thin shell solutions that in general break rotational invariance, corresponding to an instantaneous and inhomogeneous perturbation at the boundary. We also compute the stress-energy tensor of the shell using the junction formalism for null shells and obtain agreement with the point particle picture.

Presentation materials