- About this Journal
- Abstracting and Indexing
- Aims and Scope
- Article Processing Charges
- Articles in Press
- Author Guidelines
- Bibliographic Information
- Citations to this Journal
- Contact Information
- Editorial Board
- Editorial Workflow
- Free eTOC Alerts
- Publication Ethics
- Reviewers Acknowledgment
- Submit a Manuscript
- Subscription Information
- Table of Contents
Advances in Mathematical Physics
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 638726, 14 pages
doi:10.1155/2012/638726
Spacetime Junctions and the Collapse to Black Holes in Higher Dimensions
Centro de Matemática, Universidade do Minho, Campus de Gualtar, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal
Received 30 December 2011; Revised 24 April 2012; Accepted 14 May 2012
Academic Editor: Burak Polat
Copyright © 2012 Filipe C. Mena. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
We review recent results about the modelling of gravitational collapse to black holes in higher dimensions. The models are constructed through the junction of two exact solutions of the Einstein field equations: an interior collapsing fluid solution and a vacuum exterior solution. The vacuum exterior solutions are either static or containing gravitational waves. We then review the global geometrical properties of the matched solutions which, besides black holes, may include the existence of naked singularities and wormholes. In the case of radiating exteriors, we show that the data at the boundary can be chosen to be, in some sense, arbitrarily close to the data for the Schwarzschild-Tangherlini solution.