Continuous Self-Similarity and SS-Duality

We study the spherically symmetric collapse of the axion/dilaton system coupled to gravity. We show numerically that the critical solution at the threshold of black hole formation is continuously self-similar. Numerical and analytical arguments both demonstrate that the mass scaling away from criticality has a critical exponent of $\gamma = 0.264$.Comment: 17 pages, harvmac, six figures uuencoded in separate fil

The spherically symmetric collapse of a massless scalar field

We report on a numerical study of the spherically symmetric collapse of a self-gravitating massless scalar field. Earlier results of Choptuik(1992, 1994) are confirmed. The field either disperses to infinity or collapses to a black hole, depending on the strength of the initial data. For evolutions where the strength is close to but below the strength required to form a black hole, we argue that there will be a region close to the axis where the scalar curvature and field energy density can reach arbitrarily large levels, and which is visible to distant observersComment: 23 pages, 16 figures, uuencoded gzipped postscript This version omits 2 pages of figures. This file, the two pages of figures and the complete paper are available at ftp://ftp.damtp.cam.ac.uk/pub/gr/rsh100