Professor Yunqi Liu and Professor Bin Wang, published a paper titled “Critical Phenomena in Dynamical Scalarization of Charged Black Holes” in the new issue of Physical Review Letters.

The authors found a new BH scalarization mechanism through the nonlinear accretion of the scalar field in EMS theories. This mechanism is different from the previously disclosed spontaneous scalarization triggered by the linear tachyonic instability of the bald BH, in which either the bald or scalarized BH can stay stable at the same model parameter space point. The authors uncover a new family of critical solutions, which separate solutions containing scalarized BHs from those containing bald BHs. In particular, they have found the dynamical critical phenomena in the bald/scalarized BH phase transition, which is analogous to those observed in type I critical gravitational collapse. The discovery of this new critical behavior has revealed interesting nonlinear dynamics at the threshold of black hole scalarization and opened up a fascinating area of research in generalized theories of relativity and in the properties of spacetimes.

The paper is available at https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.161105