Gravitational shock wave inside a steadily-accreting spherical charged black hole

Abstract

We numerically investigate the interior of a four-dimensional, spherically symmetric charged black hole accreting neutral null fluid. Previous study by Marolf and Ori suggested that late infalling observers encounter an effective shock wave as they approach the outgoing portion of the inner horizon. Non-linear perturbations could generate an effective gravitational shock wave, which manifests as a drop of the area coordinate $r$ from inner horizon value $r_{-}$ towards zero in an extremely short proper time duration of the infalling observer. We consider three different scenarios: a) A charged black hole accreting a single (ingoing) null fluid; b) a charged black hole perturbed by two null fluids, ingoing and outgoing; c) a charged black hole perturbed by an ingoing null fluid and a self-gravitating scalar field. While we do not observe any evidence for a gravitational shock in the first case, we detect the shock in the other two, using ingoing timelike and null geodesics. The shock width $\Delta\tau$ decreases rapidly with a fairly good match to a new, generalized exponential law, $\Delta\tau\sim e^{-\intop\kappa_{-} (\widetilde{V}_{f})d\widetilde{V}_{f}}$, where $\widetilde{V}_{f}$ is a specific timing parameter for the ingoing timelike geodesics and $\kappa_{-}(\widetilde{V}_{f})$ is a generalized (Reissner-Nordstr\"om like) surface gravity of the charged black hole at the inner horizon. We also gain new insight into the inner (classical) structure of a charged black hole perturbed by two null fluids, including strong evidence for the existence of a spacelike $r=0$ singularity. We use a finite-difference numerical code with double-null coordinates combined with an adaptive gauge method in order to solve the field equations from the region outside the black hole down to the vicinity of the $r=0$ singularity.