Tipler naked singularities in N dimensions

Abstract

A spacetime singularity, identified by the existence of incomplete causal geodesics in the spacetime, is called a (Tipler) strong curvature singularity if the volume form acting on independent Jacobi fields along causal geodesics vanishes in the approach of the singularity. It is called naked if at least one of these causal geodesics is past incomplete. Here, we study the formation of strong curvature naked singularities arising from spherically symmetric gravitational collapse of general type-I matter fields in an arbitrarily finite number of dimensions. In the spirit of Joshi and Dwivedi (1993 Phys. Rev. D 47 5357), and Goswami and Joshi (2007 Phys. Rev. D 76 084026), beginning with regular initial data, we derive two distinct (but not mutually exclusive) conditions, which we call the positive root condition (PRC) and the simple positive root condition (SPRC), that serve as necessary and sufficient conditions, respectively, for the existence of naked singularities. In doing so, we generalize the results of both the aforementioned works. We further restrict the PRC and the SPRC by imposing the curvature growth condition (CGC) of Clarke and Krolak (1985 J. Geom. Phys. 2 127) on all causal curves that satisfy the causal convergence condition. The CGC then gives a sufficient condition ensuring that the naked singularities implying the PRC and implied by the SPRC, are of strong curvature type and hence correspond to the inextendibility of the spacetime. Using the CGC, we extend the results of Mosani et al (2020 Phys. Rev. D 101 044052) (that hold for dimension N = 4) to the case N = 5, showing that strong curvature naked singularities can occur in this case. However, for the case N ⩾ 6 , we show that past-incomplete causal curves that identify naked singularities do not satisfy the CGC. These results shed light on the validity of the cosmic censorship conjectures in arbitrary dimensions.