Shell crossing in generalized Tolman-Bondi spacetimes

Abstract

We study the occurrence of shell crossing in spherical weakly charged dust collapse in the presence of a nonvanishing cosmological constant. We find that shell crossing always occurs from generic time-symmetric regular initial data, near the center of the matter configuration. For non-time-symmetric initial data, the occurrence---or lack thereof---of shell crossing is determined by the initial velocity profile, for a given mass and charge distribution. Physically reasonable initial data inevitably leads to shell crossing (near the center) before the minimum bounce radius is reached.