The phenomena of collapse and dispersal for a massless scalar field have drawn considerable interest in recent years, mainly from a numerical perspective. We give here a sufficient condition for the dispersal to take place for a scalar field that initially begins with a collapse. It is shown that the change of the gradient of the scalar field from a timelike to a spacelike vector must be accompanied by the dispersal of the scalar field. This result holds independently of any symmetries of the spacetime. We demonstrate the result explicitly by means of an example, which is the scalar field solution given by Roberts. The implications of the result are discussed.
COLLAPSE AND DISPERSAL IN MASSLESS SCALAR FIELD MODELS
