Towards the final fate of an unstable black string

Abstract

Black strings, one class of higher dimensional analogues of black holes, were shown to be unstable to long wavelength perturbations by Gregory and Laflamme in 1992, via a linear analysis. We reexamine the problem through the numerical solution of the full equations of motion, and focus on trying to determine the end state of a perturbed, unstable black string. Our preliminary results show that such a spacetime tends towards a solution resembling a sequence of spherical black holes connected by thin black strings, at least at intermediate times. However, our code fails then, primarily due to large gradients that develop in metric functions, as the coordinate system we use is not well adapted to the nature of the unfolding solution. We are thus unable to determine how close the solution we see is to the final end state, though we do observe rich dynamical behavior of the system in the intermediate stages.