Dynamical Formation of Black Holes due to Boundary Effect in Vacuum Gravity

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology [Submitted on 12 Nov 2025 (v1), last revised 16 Jun 2026 (this version, v5)] Title:Dynamical Formation of Black Holes due to Boundary Effect in Vacuum Gravity View PDFAbstract:We prove the dynamical formation of a marginally outer trapped surface in pure vacuum spacetime from smooth asymptotically flat Cauchy data which initially contain no MOTS. The mechanism is a boundary effect rather than a collapse mechanism. We work in a Cauchy--double-null framework and use Yau's boundary criterion \cite{yau}, which gives the existence of an interior MOTS from a lower bound for the generalized boundary mean curvature relative to the Schoen--Yau radius of the domain. We construct an explicit class of vacuum initial data for which this criterion is strictly subcritical on the initial hypersurface, while the Einstein evolution drives the same domain into the supercritical regime. More precisely, a mild incoming gravitational radiation field increases the generalized boundary mean curvature of an isotropically large interior region sufficiently to force the formation of a MOTS in its future development. A characteristic feature of the initial data is a large interior anisotropic curvature component: the trace-free Ricci curvature is of larger order than the scalar curvature, which is balanced at the vacuum constraint scale. Thus the MOTS forms not from matter concentration or standard gravitational collapse, but from the interaction between boundary geometry, large-scale interior geometry, and the vacuum Einstein dynamics. This gives a rigorous realization of a long-suspected physical idea that apparent horizons may form from global geometric effects in vacuum general relativity. Submission history From: Puskar Mondal [view email][v1] Wed, 12 Nov 2025 17:46:48 UTC (416 KB) [v2] Fri, 21 Nov 2025 15:13:57 UTC (413 KB) [v3] Mon, 9 Feb 2026 13:33:01 UTC (1,780 KB) [v4] Tue, 17 Feb 2026 20:13:55 UTC (1,782 KB) [v5] Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:23:16 UTC (2,721 KB) Current browse context: gr-qc References & Citations Loading... Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Recommenders and Search Tools Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) IArxiv Recommender (What is IArxiv?) arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.