Shell crossing in generalized Tolman-Bondi spacetimes - art. no. 124017

We study the occurrence of shell crossing in spherical weakly charged dust collapse in the presence of a nonvanishing cosmological constant. We find t hat shell crossing always occurs from generic time-symmetric regular initia l data, near the center of the matter configuration. For non-time-symmetric initial data, the occurrence-or lack thereof-of shell crossing is determin ed by the initial velocity profile, for a given mass and charge distributio n. Physically reasonable initial data inevitably leads to shell crossing (n ear the center) before the minimum bounce radius is reached.