Cosmic Censorship of Trans-Planckian Field Ranges in Gravitational Collapse

Understand

A classical solution where the (scalar) field value moves by an ${\cal O}(1)$ range in Planck units is believed to signal the breakdown of Effective Field Theory (EFT).

• One heuristic argument for this is that such a field will have enough energy to be inside its own Schwarzschild radius, and will result in collapse.
• In this paper, we consider an inverse problem: what kind of field ranges arise during the gravitational collapse of a classical field? Despite the fact that collapse has been studied for almost a hundred years, most of the discussion is phrased in terms of fluid stress tensors, and not fields.
• An exception is the scalar collapse made famous by Choptuik.