High Energy Theory Seminar: Marija Tomašević

Title: Dressing up naked singularities

Abstract: Small naked singularities—those not shielded by a macroscopic event horizon—are ubiquitous in classical General Relativity. Their existence constitutes apparent violations of the weak cosmic censorship conjecture, which asserts that physically reasonable solutions should appear regular to asymptotic observers. In this talk, we will show how the inclusion of stringy and quantum effects resolves these pathologies by uplifting naked singularities into fully regular configurations. Focusing on critical gravitational collapse as a concrete example, we demonstrate that a proper quantum treatment replaces naked singularity formation with black hole formation. This suggests that cosmic censorship is not fundamentally a property of classical General Relativity, but rather emerges only once quantum gravitational effects are taken into account.