Scalar field black holes

With a suitable decomposition of its energy-momentum tensor into pressureless matter and a vacuum type term, we investigate the spherical gravitational collapse of a minimally coupled, self-interacting scalar field, showing that it collapses to a singularity. The formed blackhole has a mass $M \sim 1/m$ (in Planck units), where $m$ is the mass of the scalar field. If the latter has the axion mass, $m \sim 10^{-5}$ eV, the former has a mass $M \sim 10^{-5} M_{\odot}$.Comment: 8 pages, no figure

Non-adiabatic Chaplygin gas

The split of a generalised Chaplygin gas with an equation of state p = -A/\rho^{\alpha} into an interacting mixture of pressureless matter and a dark-energy component with equation of state p_{\Lambda} = - \rho_{\Lambda} implies the existence of non-adiabatic pressure perturbations. We demonstrate that the square of the effective (non-adiabatic) sound speed c_s of the medium is proportional to the ratio of the perturbations of the dark energy to those of the dark matter. Since, as demonstrated explicitly for the particular case \alpha = -1/2, dark-energy perturbations are negligible compared with dark-matter perturbations on scales that are relevant for structure formation, we find |c_s^2| << 1. Consequently, there are no oscillations or instabilities which have plagued previous adiabatic Chaplygin-gas models.Comment: Version to appear in Physics Letters

Instruções sobre coleta e envio de material para laboratório de entomologia.

bitstream/item/60480/1/IT100001.pd

Variations of the Energy of Free Particles in the pp-Wave Spacetimes

We consider the action of exact plane gravitational waves, or pp-waves, on free particles. The analysis is carried out by investigating the variations of the geodesic trajectories of the particles, before and after the passage of the wave. The initial velocities of the particles are non-vanishing. We evaluate numerically the Kinetic energy per unit mass of the free particles, and obtain interesting, quasi-periodic behaviour of the variations of the Kinetic energy with respect to the width $\lambda$ of the gaussian that represents the wave. The variation of the energy of the free particle is expected to be exactly minus the variation of the energy of the gravitational field, and therefore provides an estimation of the local variation of the gravitational energy. The investigation is carried out in the context of short bursts of gravitational waves, and of waves described by normalised gaussians, that yield impulsive waves in a certain limit.Comment: 20 pages, 18 figures, further arguments supporting the localizability of the gravitational energy are presented, published in Univers

An interacting model for the cosmological dark sector

We discuss a new interacting model for the cosmological dark sector in which the attenuated dilution of cold dark matter scales as $a^{-3}f(a)$, where f(a) is an arbitrary function of the cosmic scale factor $a$. From thermodynamic arguments, we show that f(a) is proportional to entropy source of the particle creation process. In order to investigate the cosmological consequences of this kind of interacting models, we expand f(a) in a power series and viable cosmological solutions are obtained. Finally, we use current observational data to place constraints on the interacting function f(a).Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, Phys. Rev. D (in press