Black Extended Objects, Naked Singularities and P-Branes

We treat the horizons of charged, dilaton black extended objects as quantum mechanical objects. We show that the S matrix for such an object can be written in terms of a p-brane-like action. The requirements of unitarity of the S matrix and positivity of the p-brane tension equivalent severely restrict the number of space-time dimensions and the allowed values of the dilaton parameter a. Generally, black objects transform at the extremal limit into p-branes.Comment: 9 pages, REVTE

Can Naked Singularities Yield Gamma Ray Bursts?

Gamma-ray bursts are believed to be the most luminous objects in the Universe. There has been some suggestion that these arise from quantum processes around naked singularities. The main problem with this suggestion is that all known examples of naked singularities are massless and hence there is effectively no source of energy. It is argued that a globally naked singularity coupled with quantum processes operating within a distance of the order of Planck length of the singularity will probably yield energy burst of the order of M_pc^2\approx2\times 10^{16} ergs, where M_p is the Planck mass.Comment: 4 pages, TeX, no figure

Gravitational Lensing by Rotating Naked Singularities

We model massive compact objects in galactic nuclei as stationary, axially-symmetric naked singularities in the Einstein-massless scalar field theory and study the resulting gravitational lensing. In the weak deflection limit we study analytically the position of the two weak field images, the corresponding signed and absolute magnifications as well as the centroid up to post-Newtonian order. We show that there are a static post-Newtonian corrections to the signed magnification and their sum as well as to the critical curves, which are function of the scalar charge. The shift of the critical curves as a function of the lens angular momentum is found, and it is shown that they decrease slightingly for the weakly naked and vastly for the strongly naked singularities with the increase of the scalar charge. The point-like caustics drift away from the optical axis and do not depend on the scalar charge. In the strong deflection limit approximation we compute numerically the position of the relativistic images and their separability for weakly naked singularities. All of the lensing quantities are compared to particular cases as Schwarzschild and Kerr black holes as well as Janis--Newman--Winicour naked singularities.Comment: 35 pages, 30 figure

Naked Singularity Explosion in Higher Dimensions

Motivated by the recent argument that in the TeV-scale gravity trans-Planckian domains of spacetime as effective naked singularities would be generated by high-energy particle (and black-hole) collisions, we investigate the quantum particle creation by naked-singularity formation in general dimensions. Background spacetime is simply modeled by the self-similar Vaidya solution, describing the spherical collapse of a null dust fluid. In a generic case the emission power is found to be proportional to the quadratic inverse of the remaining time to a Cauchy horizon, as known in four dimensions. On the other hand, the power is proportional to the quartic inverse for a critical case in which the Cauchy horizon is `degenerate'. According to these results, we argue that the backreaction of the particle creation to gravity will be important in particle collisions, in contrast to the gravitational collapse of massive stellar objects, since the bulk of energy is carried away by the quantum radiation even if a quantum gravitational effect cutoff the radiation just before the appearance of naked singularity.Comment: 19 pages, 2 figures; v2: typos fixe