  Motivated by the duality with thermalization in field theory, we study
gravitational collapse of a minimally coupled massless scalar field in Einstein
gravity with a negative cosmological constant. We investigate the system
numerically and establish that for small values of the initial amplitude of the
scalar field there is no black hole formation, rather, the scalar field
performs an oscillatory motion typical of geodesics in AdS. For large enough
values of the amplitude of the scalar field we find black hole formation which
we detect numerically as the emergence of an apparent horizon. Using the time
of formation as an estimate for thermalization in the field theory we conclude
that thermalization occurs very rapidly, close to the causal bound for a very
wide range of black hole masses. We further study the thermalization time in
more detail as a function of the amplitude and the width of the initial
Gaussian scalar field profile and detect a rather mild structure.
