A model for the influence of quantised fields on the gravitational collapse of a dust cloud

Abstract

The influence of the vacuum expectation value of the energy-momentum tensor of a conformally invariant free quantised field on the spherically symmetric gravitational collapse of a dust cloud is investigated in the approximation that the effects of particle creation can be neglected. The methods used are adopted from the early universe studies of Fischetti, Hartle and Hu (1979) and Anderson (1983) and the results are qualitatively similar: for certain values of an arbitrary parameter the collapse proceeds to singularity, although in a manner which differs from the classical (Oppenheimer-Snyder) behaviour, for other values of the parameter the collapse terminates before singularity and thereafter the dust cloud expands.