Stability properties of Regular Black Holes

Abstract

Black holes encountered in general relativity are characterized by spacetime singularities hidden within an event horizon. These singularities provide a key motivation to go beyond general relativity and look for regular black holes where the spacetime curvature remains bounded everywhere. A prominent mechanism achieving this replaces the singularity by a regular patch of de Sitter space. The resulting regular geometries exhibit two horizons: the outer event horizon is supplemented by an inner Cauchy horizon. The latter could render the geometry unstable against perturbations through the so-called mass-inflation effect, i.e., an exponential growth of the mass function. This chapter reviews the mass-inflation effect for spherically symmetric black hole spacetimes contrasting the dynamics of the mass function for Reissner-Nordst\"om and regular black holes. We also cover recent developments related to the late-time attractors induced by Hawking radiation which exorcise the exponential growth of the spacetime curvature encountered in the standard mass-inflation scenario. In order to make the exposition self-contained, we also briefly discuss basic properties of regular black holes including their thermodynamics.