Gravitational Collapse and Universality at Infinite Dimension

by Guilherme Pimentel (Scuola Normale Superiore)

Wednesday 29 Jul 2026, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

4/3-006 - TH Conference Room (CERN)

I will review how a series of impressive numerical calculations in the early 90s provided evidence of universal scaling behavior in gravitational collapse. Then I focus on the specific example of a spherically symmetric cloud of a perfect fluid. Using the inverse of the number of dimensions as a small parameter, we found the critical solution and computed the universal scaling behavior. At leading order, it is independent of the equation of state, and reminiscent of mean field theory. This rich system provides many potential routes for exploring universality in classical gravity, with 1/D playing a similar role as the epsilon expansion in statistical physics. Based on a series of papers to appear with Craig R. Clark.