Physicists Derive 1st Equations for Spacetime Crystals, Showing Tiny Energy Triggers Microscopic Black Holes
Updated
Updated · ScienceAlert · May 27
Physicists Derive 1st Equations for Spacetime Crystals, Showing Tiny Energy Triggers Microscopic Black Holes
4 articles · Updated · ScienceAlert · May 27
A new Physical Review Letters study gives the first analytical description of the critical-collapse state where repeating 'spacetime crystals' can tip into microscopic black holes after a tiny energy increase.
The work targets the threshold of black hole formation, a regime identified in 1993 simulations by Matthew Choptuik as showing discrete self-similarity but long considered too hard for Einstein's equations to solve directly.
By reformulating gravity in hundreds of dimensions, the researchers made the equations tractable and derived formulae for the fractal-like repeating curvature patterns that emerge during collapse.
Those mathematical structures also persisted when the model was pushed back toward far lower dimensions, suggesting the crystal-like state may capture a fundamental feature of gravity rather than a high-dimensional oddity.
The team says the method can be systematically refined, opening a new analytical tool for black-hole-related phenomena that had previously relied mainly on computer simulations.
If spacetime can form crystals, could we ever detect their ancient remnants?
Is spacetime fundamentally a crystal, with our universe just one of its states?
How does imagining infinite dimensions reveal the secrets of our four-dimensional universe?
Physicists Derive First Exact Equations for Spacetime Crystal Collapse and Microscopic Black Hole Formation
Overview
A team led by Daniel Grumiller at TU Wien and Goethe University Frankfurt has made a major breakthrough in gravitational physics by deriving the first exact mathematical equations that describe how 'spacetime crystals' can collapse to form microscopic black holes. This solves a decades-old problem and provides new insight into the early universe, where such critical states—possibly resembling spacetime crystals—may have existed just after the Big Bang. Unlike large black holes formed from collapsing stars, these tiny black holes could emerge from special critical states with only a small addition of energy, deepening our understanding of primordial black holes and cosmic evolution.