The Attractor of Evaporating Reissner-Nordstr\"om Black Holes

Abstract

Hiscock and Weems showed that there is an attractor behavior in the evolution of asymptotically flat Reissner-Nordstr\"om black hole under Hawking evaporation. If the initial charge-to-mass ratio $Q/M$ of the black hole is relatively small, then the ratio first increases until the black hole hits the attractor, and then starts to discharge towards the Schwarzschild limit. Sufficiently charged black holes, on the other hand, simply discharge steadily towards the Schwarzschild limit. In this work we further investigate the nature of the attractor, and found that it is characterized by the mass loss rate being equal to the charge loss rate. The attractor is not necessarily related to the specific heat in a general evaporating black hole spacetime, but for the Reissner-Nordstr\"om case part of the attractor lies very close to the boundary of the region where specific heat changes sign.