Gravitational collapse to extremal black holes and the third law of black hole thermodynamics

Abstract: We construct examples of black hole formation from regular, one-ended asymptotically flat Cauchy data for the Einstein-Maxwell-charged scalar field system in spherical symmetry which are exactly isometric to extremal Reissner-Nordstr\"om after a finite advanced time along the event horizon. Moreover, in each of these examples the apparent horizon of the black hole coincides with that of a Schwarzschild solution at earlier advanced times. In particular, our result can be viewed as a definitive disproof of the "third law of black hole thermodynamics." The main step in the construction is a novel $C^k$ characteristic gluing procedure, which interpolates between a light cone in Minkowski space and a Reissner-Nordstr\"om event horizon with specified charge to mass ratio $e/M$. Our setup is inspired by the recent work of Aretakis-Czimek-Rodnianski on perturbative characteristic gluing for the Einstein vacuum equations. However, our construction is fundamentally nonperturbative and is based on a finite collection of scalar field pulses which are modulated by the Borsuk-Ulam theorem.