Abstract

A Hamiltonian treatment of the gravitational collapse of thin shells is presented. The direct integration of the canonical constraints reproduces the standard shell dynamics for a number of known cases. The formalism is applied in detail to three-dimensional spacetime and the properties of the (2+ 1)-dimensional charged black hole collapse are further elucidated. The procedure is also extended to deal with rotating solutions in three dimensions. The general form of the equations providing the shell dynamics implies the stability of black holes, as they cannot be converted into naked singularities by any shell collapse process. © 2004 The American Physical Society.