Stability and critical behavior of gravitational monopoles

Abstract

I dynamically evolve spherically symmetric spacetimes containing gravitational 't Hooft-Polyakov monopoles and determine the stable end states of the evolutions. I do so to study stability and critical behavior of the well-known static gravitational monopole solutions. For the static solutions, there exist regions of parameter space where two static monopole black holes and the static Reissner-Nordstrom black hole have the same mass. I find strong evidence that one of the static monopole black hole solutions is a critical solution, to which near-critical solutions are dynamically attracted before evolving to one of the other two static solutions as end states. I also discuss the no-hair conjecture for this model in the context of collapse.