Critical phenomena in gravitational collapse with competing scalar field and gravitational waves, in 4+1 dimensions

Abstract: In the gravitational collapse of matter beyond spherical symmetry, gravitational waves are necessarily present. On the other hand, gravitational waves can collapse to a black hole even without matter. One might therefore wonder how the interaction and competition between the matter fields and gravitational waves affects critical phenomena at the threshold of black hole formation. As a toy model for this, we study the threshold of black-hole formation in 4+1 dimensions, where we add a massless minimally coupled scalar matter field to the gravitational wave ansatz of Biz\'on, Chmaj and Schmidt (in a nutshell, Bianchi~IX on $S^3\times\text{radius}\times\text{time}$). In order to find a stable discretisation of the equation governing the gravitational waves in 4+1 physical dimensions, which has the same principal part as the spherical wave equation in 9+1 dimensions, we first revisit the problem of critical spherical scalar field collapse in $n+2$ dimensions with large $n$. Returning to the main problem, we find numerically that weak gravitational wave perturbations of the scalar field critical solution decay, while weak scalar perturbations of the gravitational wave critical solution also decay. A dynamical systems picture then suggests the existence of a codimension-two attractor. We find numerical evidence for this attractor by evolving mixed initial data and fine-tuning both an overall amplitude and the relative strength of the two fields.