Gravitational collapse of a radiating shell - art. no. 104012

We study the collapse of a self-gravitating and radiating shell of bosonic matter. The matter constituting the shell is quantized and the construction is viewed as a semiclassical model of possible black hole formation. It is shown that the shell internal degrees of freedom are excited by the quantu m nonadiabaticity of the collapse and, consequently, on coupling them to a massless scalar field, the collapsing matter emits a burst of coherent (the rmal) radiation. The back reaction on the trajectory is also estimated.