On Field Theory Thermalization from Gravitational Collapse

Abstract

Motivated by its field theory interpretation, we study gravitational collapse of a minimally coupled massless scalar field in Einstein gravity with a negative cosmological constant. After demonstrating the accuracy of the numerical algorithm for the questions we are interested in, we investigate various aspects of the apparent horizon formation. In particular, we study the time and radius of the apparent horizon formed as functions of the initial Gaussian profile for the scalar field. We comment on several aspects of the dual field theory picture.

31 pages, 17 figures; V2 Some figures corrected, minor revision. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1106.2339