The Gregory-Laflamme instability of the 5D black string

with Matt Choptuik, Luis Lehner, Inaki Olabarrieta, Roman Petryk and Hugo Villegas

This animation (1.8MB) shows an embedding diagram of the apparent horizon of a perturbed 5D black string. One dimension is suppressed; vertical is along the "extra" dimension, and the horizontal direction shows the areal radius of the apparent horizon spun around the vertical axis. The simulation crashed at around t=165, due to what we think is a coordinate pathology (the curvature invariant R² remains well behaved then, but metric components start to diverge near the neck of the string)