Naked Singularities as Particle Accelerators II

Abstract

We generalize here our earlier results on particle acceleration by naked singularities. We showed recently [1] that the naked singularities that form due to gravitational collapse of massive stars provide a suitable environment where particles could get accelerated and collide at arbitrarily high center of mass energies. However, we focussed there only on the spherically symmetric gravitational collapse models, which were also assumed to be self-similar. In this paper, we broaden and generalize the result to all gravitational collapse models leading to the formation of a naked singularity as final state of collapse, evolving from a regular initial data, without making any prior restrictive assumptions about the spacetime symmetries such as above. We show that when the particles interact and collide near the Cauchy horizon, the energy of collision in the center of mass frame will be arbitrarily high, thus offering a window to the Planck scale physics. We also consider the issue of various possible physical mechanisms of generation of such very high energy particles from the vicinity of naked singularity. We then construct a model of gravitational collapse to a timelike naked singularity to demonstrate the working of these ideas, where the pressure is allowed to be negative but the energy conditions are respected. We show that a finite amount of mass-energy density has to be necessarily radiated away from the vicinity of the naked singularity as the collapse evolves. Therefore the nature of naked singularities, both at classical and quantum level could play an important role in the process of particle acceleration, explaining the occurrence of highly energetic outgoing particles in the vicinity of Cauchy horizon that participate in extreme high energy collisions.