Routing protocol

Physics

Spacetime

Instability

Computer network

Mathematics

Black hole (networking)

Mechanics

Link-state routing protocol

Gravitational singularity

Horizon

Singularity

Geometry

Theoretical physics

Computer science

Quantum mechanics

Routing (electronic design automation)

Point (geometry)

Hawking radiation

Evaporation

Thermodynamics

Journal of High Energy Physics

The evaporation of black holes raises a number of conceptual issues, most of them related to the final stages of evaporation, where the interplay between the central singularity and Hawking radiation cannot be ignored. Regular models of black holes replace the central singularity with a nonsingular spacetime region, in which an effective classical geometric description is available. It has been argued that these models provide an effective, but complete, description of the evaporation of black holes at all times up to their eventual disappearance. However, here we point out that known models fail to be self-consistent: the regular core is exponentially unstable against perturbations with a finite timescale, while the evaporation time is infinite, therefore making the instability impossible to prevent. We also discuss how to overcome these difficulties, highlighting that this can be done only at the price of accepting that these models cannot be fully predictive regarding the final stages of evaporation.

On the viability of regular black holes