Null fluid collapse in brane world models

The brane world description of our universe entails a large extra dimension and a fundamental scale of gravity that may be lower than the Planck scale by several orders of magnitude. An interesting consequence of this scenario occurs in the nature of spherically-symmetric vacuum solutions to the brane gravitational field equations, which often have properties quite distinct from the standard black hole solutions of general relativity. In this paper, the spherically-symmetric collapse on the brane world of four types of null fluid, governed by the barotropic, polytropic, strange quark "bag" model and Hagedorn equations of state, is investigated. In each case, we solve the approximate gravitational field equations, obtained in the high density limit, determine the equation which governs the formation of apparent horizons and investigate the conditions for the formation of naked singularities. Though, naively, one would expect the increased effective energy density on the brane to favor the formation of black holes over naked singularities, we find that, for the types of fluid considered, this is not the case. However, the black hole solutions differ substantially from their general-relativistic counterparts and brane world corrections often play a role analogous to charge in general relativity. As a possible astrophysical application of this work, the possibility that energy emission from a Hagedorn fluid collapsing to form a naked singularity may be a source of GRBs in the brane world is also considered.