Noname manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Critical Collapse of Scalar Fields Beyond Axisymmetry

Abstract We investigate non-spherically symmetric, scalar field collapse of a fam-ily of initial data consisting of a spherically symmetric profile with a deformation proportional to the real part of the spherical harmonic Y21(θ, ϕ). Independent of the strength of the anisotropy in the data, we find that supercritical collapse yields a black hole mass scaling Mh ∝ (p − p∗)γ with γ ≈ 0.37, a value remarkably close to the critical exponent obtained by Choptuik in his pioneering study in spherical symmetry. We also find hints of discrete self-similarity. However, the collapse ex-periments are not sufficiently close to the critical solution to unequivocally claim that the detected periodicity is from critical collapse echoing