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.