Interior instability of naked singularities of a scalar field

Abstract: We show that the $k$-self-similar naked singularity solutions of the spherically symmetric Einstein--Scalar field system are unstable to black hole formation under perturbations that are totally supported in the interior region, in all regularities strictly below the threshold. The instability below the threshold is also established for exterior perturbations. We also show that general naked singularity solutions are unstable under interior BV perturbations, which provides a new insight into understanding the weak cosmic censorship conjecture for this model. In contrast to all previous results on the exterior instability of naked singularities (and even trapped surface formation), where only a single incoming null cone is considered, the novel approach to proving the interior instability is analyzing a family of incoming null cones becoming more and more singular.