科研之友
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摘要
The Levi-Civita metric, which contains a naked singularity that has been interpreted as an infinite static line source, appears, for instance, as the possible end point in the collapse of cylindrically symmetric objects such as shells of dust. The analysis of its gravitational stability should therefore be relevant in the contexts of the cosmic censorship and hoop conjectures. In this paper we study axial gravitational perturbations of the Levi-Civita metric. The perturbations are restricted to axial symmetry but break the cylindrical symmetry of the background metric. We analyze the gauge issues that arise in setting up the appropriate form of the perturbed metric and show that it is possible to restrict the perturbations to diagonal terms but that this does not fix the gauge completely. We derive and solve the perturbation equations. The solutions contain gauge-trivial parts, and we show how to extract the gauge-nontrivial components. We impose appropriate boundary conditions on the solutions and show that these lead to a boundary value problem that determines the allowed functional forms of the perturbation modes. The associated eigenvalues determine a sort of 'dispersion relation' for the frequencies and corresponding 'wave vector' components. The central result of this analysis is that the spectrum of allowed frequencies contains one unstable (imaginary frequency) mode for every possible choice of the background metric. The completeness of the mode expansion in relation to the initial value problem and to the gauge problem is discussed in detail, and we show that the perturbations contain an unstable component for generic initial data and therefore that the Levi-Civita space times are gravitationally unstable. We also include, for completeness, a set of approximate eigenvalues and examples of the functional form of the solutions.
- 出版日期2015-3-19
