CENTRA Research News! Group members Krinio Marouda, Hannes R. Rüter, and David Hilditch just published "Twist-free axisymmetric critical collapse of a complex scalar field" in Physical Review D - American Physical Society!Their latest research investigates gravitational collapse involving a massless complex scalar field coupled to GeneralRelativity. Using the pseudospectral code bamps, they explore aspherical deviations from the spherically symmetric critical solution. Their findings confirm that the spherical critical solution of the complex scalar field matches the Choptuik solution. In the axisymmetric case they document shifts in power-law exponents and periods with increasing asphericity. At high asphericities, the centre of collapse bifurcates away from the origin on the symmetry axis. Additionally, they invent novel ways in order to extract numerical evidence which indicate that gravitational waves drive the bifurcation in highly aspherical scenarios.Explore the paper here: https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.109.124042
