  Recently it has been argued that in Einstein gravity Anti-de Sitter spacetime
is unstable against the formation of black holes for a large class of
arbitrarily small perturbations. We examine the effects of including a
Gauss-Bonnet term. In five dimensions, spherically symmetric
Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity has two key features: Choptuik scaling exhibits a
radius gap, and the mass function goes to a finite value as the horizon radius
vanishes. These suggest that black holes will not form dynamically if the total
mass/energy content of the spacetime is too small, thereby restoring the
stability of AdS spacetime in this context. We support this claim with
numerical simulations and uncover a rich structure in horizon radii and
formation times as a function of perturbation amplitude.
