×

Naked and thunderbolt singularities in black hole evaporation. (English) Zbl 0941.83525

Summary: If an evaporating black hole does not settle down to a non-radiating remnant, a description by a semi-classical Lorentz metric must contain either a naked singularity or what we call a thunderbolt, a singularity that spreads out to infinity on a space-like or null path. We investigate this question in the context of various two-dimensional models that have been proposed. We find that if the semi-classical equations have an extra symmetry that make them solvable in closed form, they seem to predict naked singularities but numerical calculations indicate that more general semi-classical equations, such as the original CGHS ones give rise to thunderbolts. We therefore expect that the semi-classical approximation in four dimensions will lead to thunderbolts. We interpret the prediction of thunderbolts as indicating that the semi-classical approximation breaks down at the end point of black hole evaporation, and we would expect that a full quantum treatment would replace the thunderbolt with a burst of high-energy particles. The energy in such a burst would be too small to account for the observed gamma ray bursts.

MSC:

83C75 Space-time singularities, cosmic censorship, etc.
83C47 Methods of quantum field theory in general relativity and gravitational theory
83C57 Black holes
PDFBibTeX XMLCite
Full Text: DOI arXiv

References:

[1] Callan, C. G.; Giddings, S. B.; Harvey, J. A.; Strominger, A., Phys. Rev., D45, 1005 (1992)
[2] Strominger, A., Phys. Rev., D46, 4396 (1992)
[3] de Alwis, S. P., Phys. Lett., B289, 278 (1992)
[4] Bilal, A.; Callan, C. G., Liouville models of black hole evaporation, PUPT-1320 (May 1992), hepth @xxx/9205089
[5] Russo, J. G.; Susskind, L.; Thorlacius, L., Phys. Rev., D46, 3444 (1992)
[6] Lowe, D. A., Phys. Rev., D47, 2446 (1993)
This reference list is based on information provided by the publisher or from digital mathematics libraries. Its items are heuristically matched to zbMATH identifiers and may contain data conversion errors. In some cases that data have been complemented/enhanced by data from zbMATH Open. This attempts to reflect the references listed in the original paper as accurately as possible without claiming completeness or a perfect matching.