News from critical collapse: Bondi mass, tails, and quasinormal modes

Abstract

We discuss critical gravitational collapse on the threshold of apparent horizon formation as a model both for the discussion of global aspects of critical collapse and for numerical studies in a compactified context. For our matter model we choose a self-gravitating massless scalar field in spherical symmetry, which has been studied extensively in the critical collapse literature. Our evolution system is based on Bondi coordinates, the mass-function is used as an evolution variable to ensure regularity at null infinity. We compute radiation quantities like the Bondi mass and news-function and find that they reflect the discretely self-similar (DSS) behavior. Surprisingly, the period of radiation at null infinity is related to the formal result for the leading quasinormal mode of a black hole with rapidly decreasing mass. Furthermore, our investigations shed some light on global versus local issues in critical collapse, and the validity and usefulness of the concept of null infinity when predicting detector signals.