COLLECTIVE BARYON DECAY AND GRAVITATIONAL COLLAPSE

While it is widely believed that the gravitational collapse of a sufficiently large mass will lead to a density singularity and an event horizon, we propose that this never happens when quantum effects are taken into account. In particular, we propose that when the conditions become ripe for the formation of a trapped surface, a quantum critical firewall sweeps over the collapsing body, transforming the nucleons in the collapsing matter into a lepton/photon gas together with droplets of a positive vacuum energy. This will happen regardless of the matter density at the time a trapped surface starts to form, and as a result, we predict that at least in all cases of gravitational collapse involving ordinary matter, a large fraction of the rest mass of the collapsing matter will be converted into a burst of neutrinos and gamma-rays. We predict that the peak luminosity of these bursts is only weakly dependent on the mass of the collapsing object, and on the order of (epsilon(q)/m(P)c(2))(1/4)c(5)/G where epsilon(q) is the mean energy of a nucleon parton and m(P) is the Planck mass. The duration of the bursts will depend on the mass of the collapsing object; in the case of stellar core collapse, we predict that the duration of both the neutrino and gamma-ray bursts will be on the order of 10 s.