We investigate both the classical and quantum gravitational collapse of a massive, charged, nonrotating [Formula: see text]-dimensional Bañados–Teitelboim–Zanelli (BTZ)-like domain wall in AdS space. In the classical picture, we show that, as far as the asymptotic observer is concerned, the details of the collapse depend on the amount of charge present in the domain wall; that is, if the domain wall is extremal, nonextremal or overcharged. In both the extremal and nonextremal cases, the collapse takes an infinite amount of observer time to complete. However, in the over-charged case, the collapse never actually occurs, instead one finds an oscillatory solution which prevents the formation of a naked singularity. As far as the infalling observer is concerned, in the nonextremal case, the collapse is completed within a finite amount of proper time. Thus, the gravitational collapse follows that of the typical formation of a black hole via gravitational collapse.Quantum mechanically, we take the absence of induced quasi-particle production and fluctuations of the metric geometry; that is, we ignore the effect of radiation and back-reaction. For the asymptotic observer, we find that, near the horizon, quantization of the domain wall does not allow the formation of the black hole in a finite amount of observer time. For the infalling observer, we are primarily interested in the quantum mechanical effect as the domain wall approaches the classical singularity. In this region, the main result is that the wave function exhibits nonlocal effects, demonstrated by the fact that the Hamiltonian depends on an infinite number of derivatives that cannot be truncated after a finite number of terms. Furthermore, in the large energy density limit, the wave function vanishes at the classical singularity implying that quantization does not rid the black hole of its singularity.
ON VACUUM-ENERGY DECAY FROM PARTICLE PRODUCTION
