Gravitational Radiation from a Naked Singularity -- Odd-Parity Perturbation --

It has been suggested that a naked singularity may be a good candidate for a strong gravitational wave burster. The naked singularity occurs in the generic collapse of an inhomogeneous dust ball. We study odd-parity mode of gravitational waves from a naked singularity of the Lema\^{\i}tre-Tolman-Bondi space-time. The wave equation for gravitational waves are solved by numerical integration using the single null coordinate. The result is that the naked singularity is not a strong source of the odd-parity gravitational radiation although the metric perturbation grows in the central region. Therefore, the Cauchy horizon in this space-time would be marginally stable against odd-parity perturbations.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, to be published in Prog. Theor. Phys. Final version, with minor changes. Reference 13 adde

Gravitational Radiation from a Naked Singularity. II - Even-Parity Perturbation -

A naked singularity occurs in the generic collapse of an inhomogeneous dust ball. We study the even-parity mode of gravitational waves from a naked singularity of the Lema\^{\i}tre-Tolman-Bondi spacetime. The wave equations for gravitational waves are solved by numerical integration using the single null coordinate. The result implies that the metric perturbation grows when it approaches the Cauchy horizon and diverges there, although the naked singularity is not a strong source of even-parity gravitational radiation. Therefore, the Cauchy horizon in this spacetime should be unstable with respect to linear even-parity perturbations.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, errors and typos corrected, final versio

Physical Processes in Naked Singularity Formation

Gravitational collapse is one of the most fruitful subjects in gravitational physics. It is well known that singularity formation is inevitable in complete gravitational collapse. It was conjectured that such a singularity should be hidden by horizons if it is formed from generic initial data with physically reasonable matter fields. Many possible counterexamples to this conjecture have been proposed over the past three decades, although none of them has proved to be sufficiently generic. In these examples, there appears a singularity that is not hidden by horizons. This singularity is called a `naked singularity.' The appearance of a naked singularity represents the formation of an observable high-curvature, strong-gravity region. In this paper we review examples of naked singularity formation and recent progress in research of observable physical processes - gravitational radiation and quantum particle creation - from a forming naked singularity.Comment: 76 pages, 25 figure file

How Do Nonlinear Voids Affect Light Propagation ?

Propagation of light in a clumpy universe is examined. As an inhomogeneous matter distribution, we take a spherical void surrounded by a dust shell where the ``lost mass'' in the void is compensated by the shell. We study how the angular-diameter distance behaves when such a structure exists. The angular-diameter distance is calculated by integrating the Raychaudhuri equation including the shear. An explicit expression for the junction condition for the massive thin shell is calculated. We apply these results to a dust shell embedded in a Friedmann universe and determine how the distance-redshift relation is modified compared with that in the purely Friedmann universe. We also study the distribution of distances in a universe filled with voids. We show that the void-filled universe gives a larger distance than the FRW universe by $\sim 5$ at $z \sim 1$ if the size of the void is $\sim 5$ of the Horizon radius.Comment: To appear in Prog. Theor. Phys. 10

Langevin Analysis of Eternal Inflation

It has been widely claimed that inflation is generically eternal to the future, even in models where the inflaton potential monotonically increases away from its minimum. The idea is that quantum fluctuations allow the field to jump uphill, thereby continually revitalizing the inflationary process in some regions. In this paper we investigate a simple model of this process, pertaining to inflation with a quartic potential, in which analytic progress may be made. We calculate several quantities of interest, such as the expected number of inflationary efolds, first without and then with various selection effects. With no additional weighting, the stochastic noise has little impact on the total number of inflationary efoldings even if the inflaton starts with a Planckian energy density. A "rolling" volume factor, i.e. weighting in proportion to the volume at that time, also leads to a monotonically decreasing Hubble constant and hence no eternal inflation. We show how stronger selection effects including a constraint on the initial and final states and weighting with the final volume factor can lead to a picture similar to that usually associated with eternal inflation.Comment: 22 pages, 2 figure

Peierls Mechanism of the Metal-Insulator Transition in Ferromagnetic Hollandite K2Cr8O16

Synchrotron X-ray diffraction experiment shows that the metal-insulator transition occurring in a ferromagnetic state of a hollandite K$_2$Cr$_8$O$_{16}$ is accompanied by a structural distortion from the tetragonal $I4/m$ to monoclinic $P112_{1}/a$ phase with a $\sqrt{2}\times\sqrt{2}\times 1$ supercell. Detailed electronic structure calculations demonstrate that the metal-insulator transition is caused by a Peierls instability in the quasi-one-dimensional column structure made of four coupled Cr-O chains running in the $c$-direction, leading to the formation of tetramers of Cr ions below the transition temperature. This furnishes a rare example of the Peierls transition of fully spin-polarized electron systems.Comment: Phys. Rev. Lett., in press, 5 pages, 3 figure

Improvement in the performance of the X-ray source based on parametric X-ray radiation using a wedge-shaped target crystal

The properties of parametric X-ray radiation (PXR) emitted from a wedge-shaped Si(111) crystal plate were experimentally investigated using the PXR generator at the Laboratory for Electron Beam Research and Application (LEBRA) of Nihon University. The wedge surface was imposed on a symmetric-cut Si(111) plate and has an asymmetric cut-surface with respect to the (111) crystal planes. As a result of the experiment, it was found that the PXR intensity improved can be obtained suppressing the degradation of the X-ray performance using a wedgeshaped target. With this improvement, phase-contrast images without absorption contrast could be obtained from DEI images taken with the exposure of severalten seconds. The reduction of the exposure time made it possible to carry out a computed tomography (CT) experiment by DEI within a practical machine time, and phase-contrast tomograms of a biological sample were obtained at the PXR energy of 17.5 keV

Gravitational Collapse of Dust with a Cosmological Constant

The recent analysis of Markovic and Shapiro on the effect of a cosmological constant on the evolution of a spherically symmetric homogeneous dust ball is extended to include the inhomogeneous and degenerate cases. The histories are shown by way of effective potential and Penrose-Carter diagrams.Comment: 2 pages, 2 figures (png), revtex. To appear in Phys. Rev.

Gravitational Collapse with a Cosmological Constant

We consider the effect of a positive cosmological constant on spherical gravitational collapse to a black hole for a few simple, analytic cases. We construct the complete Oppenheimer-Snyder-deSitter (OSdS) spacetime, the generalization of the Oppenheimer-Snyder solution for collapse from rest of a homogeneous dust ball in an exterior vacuum. In OSdS collapse, the cosmological constant may affect the onset of collapse and decelerate the implosion initially, but it plays a diminishing role as the collapse proceeds. We also construct spacetimes in which a collapsing dust ball can bounce, or hover in unstable equilibrium, due to the repulsive force of the cosmological constant. We explore the causal structure of the different spacetimes and identify any cosmological and black hole event horizons which may be present.Comment: 7 pages, 10 figures; To appear in Phys. Rev.

Dynamical renormalization group methods in theory of eternal inflation

Dynamics of eternal inflation on the landscape admits description in terms of the Martin-Siggia-Rose (MSR) effective field theory that is in one-to-one correspondence with vacuum dynamics equations. On those sectors of the landscape, where transport properties of the probability measure for eternal inflation are important, renormalization group fixed points of the MSR effective action determine late time behavior of the probability measure. I argue that these RG fixed points may be relevant for the solution of the gauge invariance problem for eternal inflation.Comment: 11 pages; invited mini-review for Grav.Cos