Quasi-Spherical Gravitational Collapse in Any Dimension

Abstract

We study the occurrence and nature of naked singularities for a dust model with non-zero cosmological constant in ($n+2$)-dimensional Szekeres space-times (which possess no Killing vectors) for $n\geq 2$. We find that central shell-focusing singularities may be locally naked in higher dimensions but depend sensitively on the choice of initial data. In fact, the nature of the initial density determines the possibility of naked singularity in space-times with more than five dimensions. The results are similar to the collapse in spherically symmetric Tolman-Bondi-Lema\^ıtre space-times.

11 Latex pages, No figure, Revtex style