Evidence for an electrifying violation of cosmic censorship

We present a plausible counterexample to cosmic censorship in four-dimensional Einstein–Maxwell theory with asymptotically anti-de Sitter boundary conditions. Smooth initial data evolves to a region of arbitrarily large curvature that is visible to distant observers. Our example is based on a holographic model of an electrically charged, localised defect which was previously studied at zero temperature. We partially extend those results to nonzero temperatures. (paper)