Looking Inside a Black Hole

Abstract

The cosmic censorship conjecture posits that singularities forming to the future of a regular Cauchy surface are hidden by an event horizon. Consequently any topological structures will ultimately collapse within the horizon of a set of black holes and so no observer can actively probe them classically. We consider here a quantum analog of this problem, in which we compare the transition rates of an Unruh-DeWitt detector placed outside the horizon of an eternal BTZ black hole and its associated geon counterpart. We find the transition rates differ, with the latter being time-dependent, implying that we are indeed able to probe the structure of the singularity from outside the Killing horizon.